Impossible Odds

people’s eyes to the screen.
    Nothing prepares a person for a sight like that, pornographically degraded “housing” sprawled for acres in hand-built shanties of scavenged boards and plastic sheeting. This was no refugee camp, but a permanent residential district. Public sanitation was nil; the place itself was a sewer. The shock of that sight hit me like smacking my head into an overhead branch.
    Susan and I had originally intended to go on this trip with a group from her master’s degree program, but they canceled due to security concerns—a theme I didn’t yet appreciate. We had already been making preparations and raising funds, so we decided that just because the group canceled didn’t mean we had to.
    We bought ourselves a ride on a tiny puddle jumper that looked as if it should have been retired back when my mother was a girl, both deciding that things like absurdly obsolete aircraft were justgoing to be part of life here. We took off for the Republic of South Sudan for my first bout with volunteer work in Africa, and I felt confident I could handle anything, with her along. She’d already been coming down to Africa to volunteer for several years.
    Giving in completely to the idea of flying in such a tiny old plane made the turbulent flight fairly easy to tolerate, and we landed ready to volunteer at an orphanage called Shekinah Fellowship Children’s Village, run by a man named Sam Childers. What I knew on that day, as opposed to what I assumed, was that the Childers organization specialized in reclaiming child soldiers who had been kidnapped and pressed into combat—boys and girls who were stolen from their families while the families themselves were often executed by the kidnappers. The working goal of the place, stripped of slogans, was to provide the orphans with some semblance of a chance for a productive life. Education was paramount. Without some form of practical education, few of them could avoid becoming criminals, with drastically shortened life expectancies.
    I didn’t doubt this was the time and place to begin the life I’d dreamed of leading for so long. Walking away from that chattering prop plane and into these new surroundings, I saw most of all that this was the time for me to attempt to become the person I hoped, but had not proved, I could be. The question was whether I could grapple with the harsh ways of this world, deal with them honorably, and keep my heart intact. I’d already met too many jaded expats and had no desire to become one myself. If the end result of a life of humanitarian work was a personal outlook of bored detachment and ironic disdain, it seemed like a waste of time and a poor excuse for an adventure.
    So I was in an optimistic state of mind when I got my starry-eyed self to South Sudan, ready to let the healing begin. The Shekinah Fellowship Children’s Village sat on donated land near the Ugandan border. Susan had been in touch with the organizationthrough an instructor from her school, and we knew they needed help. Our plan was to stay down the road at night and work in the orphanage during the day. A nearby church compound housed young soldiers training to be army chaplains, and they kindly took us in.
    It seemed like the way to go. People might question the methods Sam Childers used, but nobody doubted his determination. He was born in America in 1961 and experienced years of youthful drug addiction while he wasted time with outlaw behavior. After a religious 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,