ride ended, I turned to him, my arms still up in the air, and asked,
“Wasn’t that just like the movie?” The chief justice looked puzzled and
asked, “There’s a movie?” I knew we’d never run out of things to talk
about. Later, he came over to our house and pulled his key out of his
pocket. He slipped it in the lock and turned it tentatively. Of course it
worked, and he turned to me with a mile-wide grin.
Before we left Disneyland, the chief justice and I took the raft over to
Tom Sawyer Island. We sat at my office and talked again about kids and
justice and hope. Our conversation took a sober turn when we talked
about witch doctors and child sacrifice. To modern ears, this sounds like
something that might have happened a hundred years ago or more, but
it’s happening now. Almost a thousand children are abducted by witch
doctors in a single year in Uganda alone. The belief among witch doctors
is that the head or blood or private parts of their victims have magical
powers. They bury them in foundations of buildings and use them for
ceremonies and for other horrible practices. Mothers will protect their
newborn baby girls by piercing their ears at birth, hoping they’ll no
longer represent a perfect sacrifice.
Thousands of people in Uganda had been affected by witch doctors,
yet in the history of the country no one had ever taken on a witch doctor
in the legal system. In part, this is because the young victims never
survive. The other reality is that many, including some judges, are afraid
of the witch doctors. I asked the chief justice if he would let me be part of
a trial against a witch doctor if we ever found a victim who lived. He said
he would. It was the right conversation at the right place.
I’ve been traveling to Uganda regularly now for almost two decades with
a nonprofit I started called Love Does, which has the goal of helping
children throughout the world. We’ve tried cases involving minors
wrongfully stuck in prisons, and we operate schools and safe houses in