Everybody, Always

Uganda, Iraq, Somalia, Nepal, and India for kids who need an education
and for young girls who have been rescued from horrible circumstances.
On a trip to a prison in the bush in Uganda, far from any major city, I
met a young girl. She was thirteen years old and had been in prison for
two years. I asked the warden what the charge was and he said she was
being held for kidnapping. She had been accused of the crime, taken to
prison the same day, and remained locked up for two years without ever
stepping into a courtroom.
It’s impossible to completely read someone in a short visit, but I just
wasn’t getting the “I’m a kidnapper” vibe from the girl, so I asked her
what had happened. She told me she had been asked to take a baby girl to
the child’s mother in a neighboring village. You and I would have asked
more questions, of course, but she was a young peasant girl who was used
to doing what she was told. She took the baby to a hut and put the child in
the arms of someone she thought was the baby’s mother. As soon as she
stepped outside the hut, she heard the baby crying. It wasn’t the normal
cry of an infant. It was a desperate scream.
It turned out this wasn’t the baby’s mother at all. She had been tricked
into taking the baby to a witch doctor for a child sacrifice. Before the
baby’s life was taken, the peasant girl rushed back in, grabbed the child,
and ran back home. By then, the villagers had realized the baby was
missing, and when she returned with the child, she was arrested.
The warden was present during this conversation, so I asked him
which jail held the witch doctor who was going to sacrifice the child. I
wanted to get the other side of the story. The warden shook his head; no
arrest had been made. No questions had been asked. No one went after the
witch doctor. “What?” I almost yelled. It was the moment I decided I was
going to do something.
Someone once asked me what I would write if I only had six words
for my autobiography. Here’s what I came up with: What if we weren’t
afraid anymore? Throughout history, God has spoken three words more
often than any others when the people He loved were scared and