Machine Gun Preacher opens widely today. I wrote a piece for Foreign Policy that went up last night titled "Machine Gun Menace." It's mostly a summary of what I've written before on Childers (here, here, and here) but with some new material -- including Childers' denial to me of ever having sold arms -- and some further thoughts on the perils of armed humanitarianism. It starts with my favorite quote from Childers' book: "The Lord I serve is the living Lord Jesus. And to show you he's alive, I'm going to send you to meet him right now!" You can read the full article here. Thanks to Joshua Keating at FP for the chance to take the arguments I've made here to a broader audience (and to my friend Jesse for editing help). Dave Gilson brings the story to another audience at Mother Jones and Scott Baldauf at the Christian Science Monitor, who expressed early interest in the story, also writes about it there.
But the biggest new information on Sam Childers comes in this Christianity Today story by Mark Moring (with reporting in South Sudan by Uma Julius and Esther Nakkazi). I've been a bit frustrated by this whole Childers story since I first started writing about it, as I don't have the resources (or time, as a full time grad student) to travel and do the research necessary to address all the doubts raised by Childers' stories. Since I started writing on him I've received several emails from folks who previously or currently work in South Sudan, expressing a range of doubts -- but most of them did not want to be quoted by name for various reasons.
It looks like Moring, Julius, and Nakkazi have done the hard work of asking around to people in the community -- moving beyond the sort of trip where journalists only see what the charity wants them to see. If even half of the allegations they convey are true then this whole series of events is an absolute travesty: dozens if not hundreds of media outlets have interviewed, written about, or featured Childers. It seems that very, very few asked any critical questions or presented his story with much complexity. Some of this may be about resource constraints, but the questions are beginning to be asked now that the movie is coming out, so it's hard to say that's the whole story. I think one lesson for the future is this: when you talk to a supposed humanitarian making outlandish claims, it is not OK to only talk to them. Their actions affect others, and media should be more than megaphone-holding cheerleaders or fundraisers.
Back to the Christianity Today story. It opens:
Witnesses have said that the children at Shekinah Fellowship Children's Village are malnourished, unhealthy, and unhappy. Several locals—including pastors, government officials, and a high-ranking member of the military—tell Christianity Today that Childers has exaggerated or outright lied about his work in the African nation.
Community leaders want his orphanage in Nimule—near the border with Uganda—to be shut down immediately, and for local ministries to take over. In a September 2 letter to Childers, 14 local leaders—including the man who says he gave 40 acres of land to Childers to build the orphanage—wrote that Chiders has "dishonored our agreement" to take care of orphans, and that they demand "immediate closure of the compound." Childers told CT he never received that letter.
So it sounds like Childers may not have the community support you'd expect if he was doing good work. Childers predictably blames the allegations all on a disgruntled former employee. (Careful followers of aid scandals will note the almost exact parallel between that and Greg Mortenson's reaction to allegations against him -- Mortenson at first blamed almost everything on a disgruntled and dishonest former employee). If that was the only source of these accusations there would be plenty of reason to doubt them. But here's more from an American doctor who visited in 2009:
Wilson said no adults—including Childers—were at the orphanage when his team visited in 2009, but that they left medicine and antibiotics with clear instructions how to administer them. But when they returned two days later, none of the medicine had been given to the children.
"I don't know what to do," Wilson said, "but I have to do something." He ended up asking CT to investigate, and several people we spoke with recently confirmed what Wilson and the nurse observed.
They go on to talk about the health problems many of the children were having. Really, read it. There's also a claim that echoes a criticism someone in South Sudan emailed to me, that Childers often stages photographs and acts differently when media are around:
Okumu and others said they witnessed Childers staging photographs of himself fighting against the LRA in order to make his story sound more compelling and to attract more donors to his ministry. Okumu said Childers used guards and children from the orphanage to stage the photos nearby. "He claimed to be rescuing kidnapped children from the LRA," Okumu said. "But it was false. He just took pictures of the children in the bush around the compound here."
Seth Trudeau, who is involved with another orphanage in Nimule, South Sudan, says that Childers' orphanage was shut down by the local government last month. If that's true, it raises the question of why and how Childers is still promoting the movie to raise money for his charity (I haven't read that the orphanage was actually shut down anywhere else). Seth writes this:
Over the course of the last year, Sarah and I knew extended families who were taking their children away from the home, which surprised us. As the LRA's strength had waned in South Sudan, this children's home had broadened its focus from rescued child soldiers to all orphans and vulnerable children - which made it all the more shocking to us that families would be taking their children back: by definition, these children had come to the home because the families were so ill equipped to care for the children in the first place. At CCH, we had families who would lie about their circumstances in order to get their children in, so it struck us as strange that the opposite phenomenon was taking place on the other side of town.
Very strange indeed. If the children had extended families that could take care of them but just lacked the resources, it raises the troubling question of whether an orphanage was an appropriate charity model in the first place. Why not just support the families so they can care of the kids themselves? That -- along with the stories of Childers being absent for long periods of time and the lack of adults on site -- remind me again of criticism of orphanages as an aid model (here and here) at the blog Good Intentions Aren't Enough. Hopefully the attention from the movie and these first critical reports will lead to more questions being asked and answered.