Chris has served with WMF in Chennai, India and the US from 1993 to the present. His article appeared in The Cry, vol. 9, no. 3 (Fall 2003).
Submission comes hard for me, but four young girls in Sierra Leone have taught me how to celebrate it. Their lives are a tragic tale of forced submission, but their story is also one of redeeming submission to God. Nearly two years ago, Word Made Flesh sent an assessment team to Freetown, Sierra Leone. At that time, a 10-year civil war was slowly coming to an end, but the rebels still controlled 60% of the nation.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of a red pickup truck waiting for Phileena and Daphne Eck to meet us at the entrance of a refugee camp they had been visiting that afternoon. My window was rolled down and a number of children had gathered around the truck, trying to get my attention. Suddenly, an 11-year-old girl walked up to the open window and, as if in a daze, began telling me, “They killed my father, they took my mother, my sister was raped in front of my eyes and they forced me to watch. They killed my grandmother and my aunt. Only my sisters and I escaped with our lives.” Her name was Victoria. Obviously traumatized and almost catatonic, she exposed her horrible secrets to me.
During the confusion of escape, she was separated from her two sisters and cousin; scared and alone, she hid in the jungles for nearly five years, trying to elude the rebels and soldiers. The day I met her was the very same day she had finally been reunited with her two sisters and one cousin—the only members of her family still alive. I was shocked to learn that her remaining family members were the very girls that Phileena and Daphne had come to the camp to visit.
That day was unlike any other day in our lives. The suffering to which we were exposed broke our hearts and opened our eyes to degrees of pain that we never knew existed. Since our introduction two years ago, we have tried in what ways we could to help these four young girls reconstruct their lives. They’ve since enrolled in schools and are becoming beautiful young women.
That summer, Phileena and I went back to visit them in Freetown. The refugee camp where we first met them was gone: it was burned down and its residents were thrown to the streets. The girls found another camp, more like a slum, on the edge of the city. One afternoon we went to visit them.
The floor of their room was muddy and uneven, the leaky ceiling made of plastic tarps and the door, hardly able to bear the burden of its own weight, kept opening to let in the hot afternoon sunlight. We spoke of their studies and asked about their health. Victoria, the girl whose story came spilling through my window two years earlier, began sharing about their lost childhood. She almost never speaks, but she seemed compelled to tell us more of her story.
The twins were six years old when the rebels attacked and destroyed their village. They slit their mother’s throat open and the girls were forced to watch her die. With tears pouring down her face, Victoria recalled the terrible day. As their mother bled to death, she struggled to pass along survival skills to her daughters. Between gasps, she reminded her girls that God would watch over them and protect them. The rebels threatened to kill the girls if any of them cried. Finally, when their mother stopped breathing, the sisters dragged her dead body to a gutter where they covered the corpse with banana leaves as a form of respect and burial.
The girls then ran to the jungles, hiding in the bush and serving as prisoners of war. Victoria was soon separated from her sisters and cousin. A group of soldiers found her alone in the jungle. They tied her to a stick and in exchange for her life, they gang-raped her. She was eight years old.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. In fact, I didn’t want to believe it. That night I couldn’t sleep; I couldn’t get her story out of my head and the cries and screams of an eight-year-old girl haunted me. How many nights have her memories and cries kept her awake?
Our remaining days together were special. Victoria, Veronica and the others would teach us songs of grace and forgiveness. When they prayed, the presence of Christ was intense. On the day we had to say good-bye, we wept together and asked that God would tenderly care for these children.
These precious ones were forced to submit to a life they never would have chosen for themselves. But today, they celebrate submission to Christ as a means of making sense of the horror. Victoria, Veronica and the others are a fulfillment of the promise, “From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger” (Ps. 8:2). Though my life is so different from theirs, it is from their example that I continue to learn how to celebrate submission to Christ as an act of worship.