The year is 1998, and Sam Childers arrives in Yei to help build houses damaged by the civil war in the small town of war-ravaged Southern Sudan.
He had been persuaded by his Pastor thousands of miles away in the United States to lend a hand in the construction of missionary houses.
This would be one of his many life-changing attachments to the people and especially the children of South Sudan.
While constructing, Sam said he stumbled across a body of a child torn apart by a landmine. It is at that moment he said he decided to dedicate his life to helping children in South Sudan.
He returned several months later and opened a clinic and later on an orphanage centre in Nimule, during the height of the abduction, maiming, and killing by the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army.
With a Bible in one hand, and an AK47 in the other, Sam Childers began to lead armed missions to rescue children from the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army led by Uganda’s warlord, Joseph Kony.
Because of Sam’s bravery and courage to venture into the bushes and jungles of East Africa to recover lost children coupled with his missionary work, the local people anointed him the “Machine Gun Preacher.”
A movie based on Sam’s biography, “Another Man’s War” was made into a Hollywood film in 2011.
Since the outbreak of the conflict in South Sudan in 2013, Sam has received more children in the World Missions Shekinah Fellowship Children’s Village in Nimule.
Last week, the Machine Gun Preacher and security personnel led a 48-hour mission to retrieve children displaced by the conflict in the bushes and some villages in Magwi County, Imatong state.
Sam shares his story with Daniel Danis..