Impossible Odds

sound itself was painful. The armed men of the compound grabbed their weapons and began returning fire, creating an instant war zone.
    Instinct took over. Susan and I pressed our bodies flat against the ground and crawled through the darkness to a hut farther away from the shooting. We lay there in stark terror while gunfire and screaming went on all around us. Somebody whispered that the attackers were from the Lord’s Resistance Army.
    This meant we were under attack from fighters who were known to torture and kill their victims. The gunfire raged around us while the defending soldiers put up a stiff fight. We were unable to move. There was nothing to do but wait and hope the defenders were up to the job. If the LRA soldiers overran the place and took prisoners, they would undoubtedly consider women like Susan and me interlopers in their struggle. After all, we were there to aid an organization whose mission was to draw fighters away from their “army.” They would almost certainly want to set a public example in the way they killed us.
    I am alive only because the attackers were either driven back or stole what they were after and departed. We escaped the gunfire by lying low, and learned many of the children ran off into the wilderness to escape being kidnapped again. At that time there was no way of knowing how many would be reacquired by the LRA or killed trying to run, or how many might live to return. The aftermath of the adrenaline overdose left me nauseated and shaky.
    Welcome to Africa, Great and Heroic Saviors. What now?
    It later turned out that the attackers didn’t seem committed to killing or torturing, but just fired into the air to scare people away and then raided the compound’s supplies—the local version of grocery shopping. They were successful in that no bodies were left behind, so they would have every reason to repeat the raid at will. It seemed plain that our capture was only a matter of time—afterall, we were just two schoolteachers with no combat training and no weapons. My first attempt at volunteer work in Africa turned out to be sadly brief.
    Susan was able to contact the pilot of our puddle jumper and arranged for us to evacuate the next morning. It was completely disorienting to be retreating so soon, but our mission was to attempt to nurture and educate orphaned kids, not engage in combat with gangs of marauders. Even trained soldiers hate to go up against fighters who are drugged into fearlessness.
    We gladly climbed into the tiny plane, whose size and condition didn’t trouble me nearly as much this time. It rattled and coughed its way into the air, carrying us away from the Lord’s Resistance Army and a problem just a tad larger than we expected. I didn’t see anything in the Childers orphanage that justified attempting to return to that place, and I had to ask myself what sort of help I would be providing to the orphans if I did. The departure was sudden and painful but the message in it was clear. Wherever my future happened to lie in Africa, it sure wasn’t there in South Sudan. But I had seen enough to know it was somewhere there in Africa. I could already feel the roots taking hold.

CHAPTER FIVE
    It wasn’t Erik’s stint as a conscript sergeant in the Swedish military back in the day that landed him in Africa in 2006. Although his military unit dealt with antisabotage and counterintelligence, teaching him things he still used in Africa, all that had no bearing on his decision to go. He had studied international law and politics for years and was fascinated with the twists and turns of legal arguments, but those things alone never would have taken him so far from home. His commitment to work in places like Kenya and Somalia was cemented by his work at the Swedish Migration Board in the position of asylum officer in the four years just before his move to Africa.
    The job kept him face to face with asylum applicants from the Horn of Africa region, one after another. Many showed up desperate to pour out their stories of repression in their far-off homeland, often describing a list of lethal dangers menacing them if they were forced to return.
    He ran across a few fakers from time to time, knowing every public resource will have its problems of abuse. But he didn’t believe the average human being could convincingly fake such stories when the audience is someone who listens to them every day. A person develops the unhappy skill of spotting liars by listeningto so