I met Christopher in a square, tall-ceilinged office at the Children of the Nations compound in Lira. Children of the Nations (COTN) is an international organization that works to bring hope to orphans and abandoned children through education. When I talked to Christopher, COTN had 61 orphans in Lira that they were taking care of.
Christopher was getting ready for the arrival of a western team that was coming in the next day, and he joked with us that he needed to print his own business cards.
But life for him didn’t always look so promising.
When he was 8 years old, Christopher lived in Gulu with his mom and dad and little brothers. But that was before the LRA attacked. The day the rebel army came, they caught Christopher’s father and chopped him into pieces with a panga. Do you remember what a panga is?
Just like that, Christopher was fatherless.
His mother immediately moved the family out of Gulu, walking, trying to find a different place to live. A place where they would be safe. They walked 60 miles to an IDP camp. But the LRA attacked again. So the family moved again. Only to be attacked again.
After the third attack, Christopher decided he might be safer in a town instead of in an IDP camp. So he and his younger brother moved to Lira. Where they spent the next six months living on the streets.
A pastor heard about the boys and began sponsoring them so they could go to school. While he was studying at the age of 16, Christopher had a vision. A vision of himself surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of street kids. Abandoned. Neglected. Orphans like himself. And in the vision, Christopher was taking care of them all.
Christopher’s friends began to tell him that through his time on the streets, God had prepared him to help children who are where he once was. Christopher himself said this: “Why did I stay on the street? I think it was a training ground.”
A bad circumstance. A trial. An ugly part of his life . . . that God made good.
Today Christopher and his wife Joy (he calls her meta charis because it means “with joy” in Greek, and she brings him joy, and he likes studying Greek) have twins, a boy and a girl, who are a few months old. Joy heard on the news one night about a baby who had been found in the trash on the side of the road, abandoned. The infant was dead. The news made Joy cry. After having children of her own, she couldn’t understand how someone could just leave a baby to die like that. About his own life, Christopher says this: “If there is any passion I have for Christ, it is to see the faithfulness of Christ as I obey Him. God told us to take care of the orphans and widows, and this is what I want to do.”
