And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for the length of all my days.” “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. The boy must have been a member of an English–language church, because he has stopped using his native Dhuluo and instead is babbling in English, prayers and long quotes from the Bible, in solemn tones, as if he were reading a Latin mass: He clutches his scratched black machine gun with one hand while his other hand rubs the cross that hangs from a chain around his neck outside his red and blue I LOVE HONG KONG T–shirt. He stands there, his eyes fixed on the sea of people that surrounds the car just a short distance away a crowd that is growing and becoming better armed with every passing minute. Until now he’s been high on some junk, but he’s coming down and terror is tearing him apart. It’s easy to spot that he is new to all this and caving in under the pressure. He is very different from the child soldiers she wrote about back home in Copenhagen. “Name of love and power! Through You, sins are forgiven, enemies are vanquished, the sick.” “O glorious Name of Jesus, gracious Name,” the youngest of their captors intones. The sloping three–foot–high mound gives off the unmistakable stench of the slum. Garbage, mostly rotting green items mixed with human excrement, has piled up against the wall of a nearby cow dung hut. Drops of sweat have collected in her ears and everything sounds muffled, a bit like the whirring of a fan. It is enough to make Roberto lower his arm with the same measured slowness. One of the hostage takers turns his head away from watching the locals to stare at Roberto and shakes his sharpened, one–and–a–half–foot–long panga. “Why can’t they at least pull over into the shade?” He falls silent and lifts his hand very slowly toward the lower rim of his sunglasses. Roberto, Iben’s immediate boss, looks at his fellow hostages. Dense clusters of huts are scattered all over the dusty plain. The Nubians have constructed their grayish brown huts from a framework of torn-off branches spread with cow dung. The car stands on a mud surface, still ridged with tracks made after the last rains, now baked as hard as stoneware by the sun. It smells and looks like a filthy cattle pen. Sweat pours down his cheeks and into the corners of his mouth. Roberto’s English accent is usually perfect, but now, for the first time, you can hear that he is Italian. “I mean, what are we waiting for? Why don’t they just drive on through the crowd?” Burned–out cars block the road ahead, but it ought to be possible to reverse and outflank them by driving right through the flimsy small shacks. The truck with the four aid workers and two of the hostage takers on the tailgate has been stopped for an hour or more. Normally he would never say such a harsh thing. “Don’t they ever think about anything except killing each other?” Roberto asks.

The exception by christian jungersen