Samuel has a secret. A secret he will never share.

“Some of these secrets are for me and for me alone because if I share it with other people … it endangers my life.”

Eleven years ago, Okodo Samuel was living in Abia, a village in northern Uganda. Samuel is part of a subsistence farming family, which means they grow enough food to feed themselves. They also sell the cassava root — a starchy food full of carbohydrates — to others in Abia. By selling cassava by the roadside of his village, Samuel was able to make a decent living. At 17, the eldest of nine children, Samuel was the only child his grandparents were sending to school in hopes that he would

become the provider for their family.

The outlook for Samuel’s future was relatively good, considering he had a privilege denied to many Ugandan youth: the opportunity to pursue an education and a means of making money in the meantime, even as a civil war disrupted lives in other villages in the north.

One night, when Samuel was 17, word reached him that the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army were coming to raid his village. He and his mother fled to hide with his sister in her hut, but the rebels found them.

They set fire to his sister’s hut and beat his mother severely, then took him away into the bush. Rebel forces returned later and killed his father, leaving Samuel’s family without a source of income.