epiphany, he learned about the destructive work of a quasimilitary criminal gang with the dubious name of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Childers was outraged by the group’s sadistic policy of kidnapping children and drafting them into combat units, sometimes forcing these young people to shoot their own families before the LRA took them away.
I couldn’t help but resonate with the revulsion Childers expressed for the LRA tactics against children. Somehow, this man managed to carve out a place in the wilderness under the constant threat of torture and death by his LRA opponents. My admiration for his courage was probably the thing most responsible for bringing me to that place.
I was running on momentum and brushed aside my initial observations of the squalor of the “Children’s Village,” but it was startling. I knew funding had to be a constant problem, yet the grounds had a look of sloppy indifference completely out of step with the mission of the orphanage. A smattering of small, rough-hewn huts or cabins were scattered around, but there was no sign of a medical center or of schooling of any kind. There appeared to be no resources for teaching and few for amusement. The orphanage’s land grant of two hundred acres was large enough that no security walls were required, and the lightly forested terrain kept visibility local, giving a pleasant pastoral quality to the environment, if you ignored the people living in it. The orphanage residents sat orplayed in the dry air amid the dust that seemed to cover every-thing.
We asked if we could meet Childers, but were told he had been back in America for some time, doing public relations. I had to wonder if the apparently lax condition of things around there was because in his absence the overall system had unspooled. I tried to imagine a child being “rehabilitated” there and couldn’t get a picture to come into focus.
Still, we had just arrived, and it would have been a bad idea to start walking around questioning why things looked so bleak. The orphanage was everything I expected it to be: an isolated place in a clear state of need. The children there struck me as reasonably open and friendly, given their backgrounds, but I think somehow my unconscious mind was already taking note of things I wouldn’t allow myself to openly consider. The message “you should have known better” began to tug at the edge of my awareness.
A desperate atmosphere pervaded the entire place. Nobody seemed to have enough of anything. But the younger kids were willing to engage with us after some initial hesitation, and I began to pass out the art supplies.
It was a measure of my failure to appreciate the level of desperation there that I soon noticed the glitter had all disappeared. It took a while to realize the kids apparently thought it was candy and ate it. Their desire for some sort of a treat was strong enough that they ignored the metallic taste of the stuff for the joy of eating something shiny.
It hadn’t even occurred to me to look out for that. And the message in it was clear: There was a huge disconnect between my enthusiasm to be of service and the lethal gravity of the situation in that place.
I tried to sense the staff’s compassion or the humanitarian concern that seemed inseparable from a job such as theirs, but if thoseattitudes existed there I somehow missed them. I was completely unprepared for the level of fatalistic acceptance in that place.
Most of the young residents were escaped child soldiers or orphans created in raids by the LRA. This terrorist/criminal group is widely known for the kind of savagery that forms a working definition of raw psychosis, or as some would put it, of evil on a biblical scale. Those children were subjected to horrors that surpass all understanding, including being drugged into near oblivion and then, with a gun to their heads, forced to kill their own family members so there would be nobody to look for them. It was a
I couldn’t help but resonate with the revulsion Childers expressed for the LRA tactics against children. Somehow, this man managed to carve out a place in the wilderness under the constant threat of torture and death by his LRA opponents. My admiration for his courage was probably the thing most responsible for bringing me to that place.
I was running on momentum and brushed aside my initial observations of the squalor of the “Children’s Village,” but it was startling. I knew funding had to be a constant problem, yet the grounds had a look of sloppy indifference completely out of step with the mission of the orphanage. A smattering of small, rough-hewn huts or cabins were scattered around, but there was no sign of a medical center or of schooling of any kind. There appeared to be no resources for teaching and few for amusement. The orphanage’s land grant of two hundred acres was large enough that no security walls were required, and the lightly forested terrain kept visibility local, giving a pleasant pastoral quality to the environment, if you ignored the people living in it. The orphanage residents sat orplayed in the dry air amid the dust that seemed to cover every-thing.
We asked if we could meet Childers, but were told he had been back in America for some time, doing public relations. I had to wonder if the apparently lax condition of things around there was because in his absence the overall system had unspooled. I tried to imagine a child being “rehabilitated” there and couldn’t get a picture to come into focus.
Still, we had just arrived, and it would have been a bad idea to start walking around questioning why things looked so bleak. The orphanage was everything I expected it to be: an isolated place in a clear state of need. The children there struck me as reasonably open and friendly, given their backgrounds, but I think somehow my unconscious mind was already taking note of things I wouldn’t allow myself to openly consider. The message “you should have known better” began to tug at the edge of my awareness.
A desperate atmosphere pervaded the entire place. Nobody seemed to have enough of anything. But the younger kids were willing to engage with us after some initial hesitation, and I began to pass out the art supplies.
It was a measure of my failure to appreciate the level of desperation there that I soon noticed the glitter had all disappeared. It took a while to realize the kids apparently thought it was candy and ate it. Their desire for some sort of a treat was strong enough that they ignored the metallic taste of the stuff for the joy of eating something shiny.
It hadn’t even occurred to me to look out for that. And the message in it was clear: There was a huge disconnect between my enthusiasm to be of service and the lethal gravity of the situation in that place.
I tried to sense the staff’s compassion or the humanitarian concern that seemed inseparable from a job such as theirs, but if thoseattitudes existed there I somehow missed them. I was completely unprepared for the level of fatalistic acceptance in that place.
Most of the young residents were escaped child soldiers or orphans created in raids by the LRA. This terrorist/criminal group is widely known for the kind of savagery that forms a working definition of raw psychosis, or as some would put it, of evil on a biblical scale. Those children were subjected to horrors that surpass all understanding, including being drugged into near oblivion and then, with a gun to their heads, forced to kill their own family members so there would be nobody to look for them. It was a
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