Impossible Odds

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 systematic method of terrorizing an entire population. The dark purpose was to effectively stigmatize the captured children among their own communities and ruin their family base, traumatizing them so thoroughly that they never wanted to go home again. Shackles weren’t needed; the kids had nowhere left to go.
    I knew of few places other than that orphanage that were making any serious attempt to reacquire and rehabilitate children who’d seen every source of hope snatched away. For most of these very young people, their grim situation was amplified by a drug regimen forced on them and sustained until addiction took over and drove them on its own. Getting away from the drugs was only the first step of their long recovery, if there was to be one at all.
    After an awkward and confusing first day, we joined some of the student chaplains in their hut back at the compound during the single hour of electrical power provided for the night. They were fans of the TV series 24 and made it plain this was how the hour of electricity would be spent. It was so odd to see that very American program in this place, when the locations on the screen were as foreign to this audience as another planet.
    I’ll never know what sort of headway Susan and I might have made at the orphanage. That night, in the stillness and darkness of that isolated place, automatic weapons fire abruptly broke outall around us. Chaos exploded and bullets flew everywhere in the darkness. The explosions of gunfire were so loud the