CHAPTER 22

Kabi

What we punish, God can forgive.

The minute he attacked Charlie, Kabi became my enemy. He wasn’t a

little evil; he was pure evil. It’s easy to talk a good game about loving
your enemies until you have one. I realized if I wanted big things to
happen in my life, I’d need to take bigger steps and risk more than I had
before, so I decided to visit Kabi in prison.
Kabi had been sent to Luzira Maximum Security Prison. Luzira is one
of the scariest places on the planet. It was built in 1920 for two hundred
death row inmates. There are over three thousand men in Luzira today.
There are no windows in most places. If you go to Luzira, you go to die.
I contacted the warden at the Luzira prison. I gave him my name and
said I’d like to see Kabi. He told me absolutely not. It was a maximum-
security prison and no one gets in to see people like Kabi. I told the
warden I was the honorary consul for the Republic of Uganda, and after a
short pause he said, “You’re in.”
Kabi entered the dark room where I was waiting. He had no shoes and
was wearing a torn and dirty prison uniform. When he entered, he took a
knee and told me how bad he felt about what he had done to Charlie.
Skeptical, I thought he was just sorry because we had caught and
punished him. He told me what it was like growing up the son of a witch
doctor and what witchcraft had done to him over the course of his life.
Then he said something that stunned me. He said, “I know I’m going to
die in here. What I really need is forgiveness.”
His words hung in the air.