Okay. So this goes back ten years or so—when the warlord named Kony had retreated out of Uganda and was hiding in the forests between Congo and Sudan. You may not remember, but he was making quick raids with his so-called “Lord’s Resistance Army” then slinking back over borders, dragging kidnapped boys he would turn into soldiers or girls he would make into slaves. Warriors for Jesus, he called his conscripts, telling them, that if they crossed themselves with oil, they would be impenetrable by bullet or blade.

And me? I guess I was my own sort of warrior. I had just arrived from the U.S. as an adrenaline-spiked rookie at the Catholic hospital in Nzara, South Sudan, starting off a three-year term as a doctor with the Comboni lay missionaries.

Honestly, I was proud to be out there on the edge of everything. A unit of U.S. special forces was camped fifteen miles away, tightening the noose on Kony’s ragtag fighters, which made me feel a bit safer, but also like I could find myself in the middle of a full-out firefight. I had survived an attack of malaria right when I arrived, which added a spiritual buzz since malaria bonded me with our founder, Daniel Comboni, who had nearly succumbed to the disease as he sailed up the Nile in the 1800s. I had it easier obviously, but it was still no joke. I shivered so hard that the metal bedframe walked a foot or two, like it was trying to take me out of the room.

So yes, I was a bit smug to be soldiering on, sustaining my pace at work even after the malaria scare and after the sheer workload began to take its toll. I was doing over 15 surgeries a week, which meant I might complete 800 in the first year. I couldn’t believe it myself, since I had never done more than 500 a year back at the Boston Eye Institute.

These weren’t typical suburban cataracts either. They weren’t “everything-looks-a-bit-fuzzy” cataracts. In South Sudan, people will put up with clouding until it covers the lenses completely. Their eyes appear poached, which means they are essentially blind. Then they adjust. If they are lucky, they have a grandchild who can lead them on a stick. Maybe they have someone to cook for them. So removing cataracts was huge. To take the eyepatch off was practically biblical. An “Amazing Grace.”

I didn’t have the expensive ultrasound equipment I was accustomed to. I had to make old- school incisions. But once the word got out, there was no end to the waiting room line. They came from hundreds of miles away, sometimes walking, and when the patches were removed, they bowed and clung to my hands, weeping. They even sang!

At moments like that, I felt awfully good. God was using me. Or at least that was what I told myself when I went over to join the Comboni sisters for morning prayers and our communal breakfast.

But it was not an easy year. The malaria was straight-out-scary. And twelve months of unrelieved work in sweltering heat had made its mark. Maddening fungal infections cropped up in all the crevices of my body. Some nights I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours. Too often I was overcome by an embarrassing, near-weeping desire for an air conditioner or a single bowl of raspberry sorbet.

I kept reminding myself that I had gone to Sudan for the right reasons. To do what God wanted, to make a real difference. Don’t forget what you used to feel, I told myself. After five years of post-residency surgeries, you were empty as a broken bottle.

At the Eye Institute in Massachusetts, I had been essentially a white-collar middle-manager, keeping the receptionists and nurses and billing agents hard at work bringing in revenue. Granted, the paychecks were impressive. But if I stepped into the hallway between procedures, I could see half a dozen doors where half a dozen other quite replaceable docs were maintaining the same money-making system, just waiting for a game of weekend golf or a yacht trip in the bay.

I felt unaccountably weary and sad after five years of that. So I prayed during Mass one Sunday, asking, “God, is this it?” Then I stayed after the service.

Father Sean was the one who introduced me to the lay order of Comboni missionaries, and basically that’s how I ended up in Nzara. I mean, it took selling a condo and saying goodbye to a woman who thought I had gone off the deep end. It took psychological tests, then 14 weeks of intensive mission training, including an introduction to the newest nation in the world—The Republic of South Sudan. But that little nudge in the middle of a Sunday Mass—that’s what turned the wheel on everything I had pursued.

By the time I arrived in Nzara, I had learned all about the South’s long struggle for independence and about the age-old troubles between the Dinka and the Nuer. The Zande people, too, had been terrorized by Kony’s army, but they were no longer hiding in the woods on a moment’s notice. They were rebuilding and having wedding celebrations. They were getting sudden help from relief agencies—new wells and loans for cottage industries and long-overdue surgeries. So I felt an immediate pressure to do my own part.

I think the surgical work was my way of not thinking too much, to be honest. If I let myself think, I might have had to face the god-awful sense of desolation that sometimes swept over me during the first months, brought on by the dust and densely tangled forest and the dawn wake-up drumming next to the Church of Sacred Heart. I just kept doing what I thought God wanted. In fact, I didn’t let myself think much even after I realized that soon I would be taking my first trip back to the States for Christmas. I kept working right until the morning of December 21, when I would fly to Juba then Nairobi, London, and Boston, where snow was reportedly piled up so high that snowplow drivers refused to do their job for fear of clipping buried cars.

Our hospital driver—Samuel—came to my tin-roofed, adobe bungalow at sunrise and drove me out of the compound, headed to the airstrip at Yambio—a red dirt strip complete with cattle that had to be herded away. He wanted to get there an hour before the UNHCR flight, which was the only flight you could really count on, always close to 10:00 am on Tuesday mornings. And I was glad he came early because I knew that Samuel would stop for anyone who wanted a ride. In the past, when he drove me to villages for mobile clinics, we stopped every mile or two to let another person hop into the bed of the pickup which meant stopping again to let them off on a dirt path a few miles down the road. A forty-mile trip to the airstrip in Yambio could involve half a dozen prolonged delays with robust greetings and long thank yous.

To my surprise, however, on this morning we passed no men carrying hoes to their fields or women striding along with five-gallon tins of palm oil on their heads. The only interruption came 20 miles down the road, as we entered a forest of immense teak trees. There, we came upon a thick log lying across the gravel.

Samuel saw no way around this barrier, due to the steep shoulders and the pressing forest. He was going to backtrack to a farm trail. But when he started to turn the pick-up, a group of men appeared on the road behind us. They were very young men, boys really, some only 12 or 13, and they had guns. They pointed them at us, shouting for us to get out. They pushed Samuel and me away from the vehicle while one of them ransacked it, pulling maps out of the glove compartment, tossing floormats to the ground, dragging my suitcase from the truck bed.

A short, hard-faced boy with a duct-taped pistol pulled everything out of my pockets, out of Samuel’s pockets too. Wallet, cellphone, passport, keys. He hardly came up to my chest, but he yanked my watch off my wrist then pointed at my shoes and commanded, “Give.” He pulled the insoles out, looking for whatever might be hidden. Then he threw them down and demanded Samuel’s wedding ring.

“Where is the money?” a bigger boy commanded, pointing a semi-automatic rifle at my belly.

“You’ve got it,” I replied, knowing that the only money was what they had found in my wallet—a few Sudanese pounds and one hundred and twenty U.S. dollars that I had been saving for airport fees.

He wagged his head and pushed the nose of the rifle into my stomach.

“Where is the money?”

“I don’t have any more,” I said. “I was just going to the airport, taking enough for the trip.”

He swung the rifle toward the forest and let off a blast of bullets, tearing leaves out of the trees. I jumped but then tried to remain as calm as I could. All his compatriots were shouting, alarmed. He ignored them, lifting the gun and pointing the barrel right at my face.

“I am serious,” he said.

For the first time I realized where this might all end. Somehow, until then, I had thought we were just acting out another test of some sort. As if this were another of the many unexpected trials I had lived through in the last year—like the flying ants that suddenly swarmed out of the ground, turning the air into a swirl of cellophane wings and tiny frantic legs. Or the dust storm that loomed five thousand feet high, swallowing us in its thick powdery maw. Or the spitting cobra that left venom on my glasses when I surprised it at the outhouse. All those events were crazy in a surreal, invented way. And since I had survived such a series of oddities, I thought surely I would survive this one as well.

But I smelled the burnt gunpowder and the heated oil wafting from the worn rifle with its wooden grips and curved metal cartridge. I heard an ibis crying over the trees. And I knew that I was in a major dilemma because there really was no more money.

“You can take the truck,” I said.

He shook his head. “It is already ours. Give me money.”

Samuel had said nothing, not since protesting about his ring, so I glanced toward him, hoping he might be able to resolve things, but he had his eyes closed. His lips were moving, and I knew immediately that he was saying the “Our Father,” as he did every week at Sacred Heart services. He was simply praying there in his socks, while his shoes got tried on by one of the larger boys.

As I looked at Samuel’s earnest but calm face, I knew how close we were to our demise, but I also felt an unexpected surge of affection. Samuel, for all his stop-start driving and extended greetings, represented, for a moment, all of the best that I had seen in South Sudan. The faithful patience, the unworried generosity, the simple ability to let go—to say “What does it matter really?”

Although Arabic is no longer used as the lingua franca of independent South Sudan, every once in a while I would still hear some older person say “malesh,” meaning “never mind.” And that is what Samuel seemed to be doing now with his quiet composed prayer.

“If God wills,” our church members would say when talking with me about their plans for the next day. Or “Inshallah,” if they were slipping back into Arabic. And now that same thought blossomed in me.

The muzzle of the gun barrel was pressed against my forehead. It hurt. But I was no longer anticipating the bullet. Instead, I was filled with an unexpected appreciation for Samuel and for all the other coworkers and people at the Nzara church: The old men who had shaken my hand each Sunday with dusty callused hands. The long-limbed women in the choir, who processed into the church with tambourines and high-pitched chants, dancing forward in bright pink dresses, three small steps toward the altar then two back.

“Last chance,” said the boy with the rifle, but I was looking at Samuel, who had still not opened his eyes. Strangely, I thought of his three children, who had come racing to my house on the night of the flying ants. Those winged insects would flutter toward light as soon as they emerged from their mounds, which is why other neighbors were out building fires. But Samuel’s kids could see that ants were swarming around the lightbulb on my veranda, so they came racing, knocking the flapping creatures out of the air with their shirts then lifting them by the palmful—to toss into a bucket of water, where their gossamer wings stuck.

The youngest, a girl of only six, was delighted to be out in the dark with her older siblings. She squealed as she grabbed at the air, catching ants one by one and tossing them into the bucket. She took a big one apart, plucking its see-through wings then poking the leg-waggling creature into her mouth and grinning as if she were a trick-or-treater enjoying prized Halloween candy.

She grabbed another one out of the bucket and popped the wings off then handed it to me, and though it went against all my medical training, I pinched the still-wet ant into my mouth, feeling it struggle before I pushed it to the side with my tongue and bit down, tasting a little burst of buttery flavor, something entirely different than I had known in my thirty-three years.

“Do you understand?” my captor said. “I am going to shoot.”

I turned my gaze to his eyes, knowing there was nothing more to be done. I could see that he was resolved. I could see that he was still not fully a man, therefore less likely to reason. He was half a foot shorter than me. His skin had the unwrinkled gloss of youth, even though he was gaunt in the cheeks. His eyes were filmy. Not like cataracts but more like someone who had smoked too much ganja.

I didn’t dislike him. I felt sorry actually. Who knew what life he had known before Kony got hold of him? Who knew what sadness he had swallowed each evening once the fire was put out?

“Shoot me then,” I said--if you must.”

I gazed into my captor’s eyes, thinking that he was just a boy trying to do what he thought he should do, maybe even thinking this was what God required. Weirdly, I was more at peace than I had been all the last year, or the five years in Boston, or the previous years in med school and college. I couldn’t remember ever being so at peace, unless it was as a four-year-old waking at my grandparents’ summer lake house with water lapping just outside the screen window.

You know the rest, right? If he had pulled the trigger, I wouldn’t be telling you this.

Instead, he held my gaze a few seconds then shook his head, letting an incredulous smile break out.

“Enough,” he shouted, and the other boys ran for the truck as if they had been hoping for that conclusion. They leaped into the bed with their guns, while he walked to the driver’s door and slid in. Then he turned the key and put the vehicle into gear.

He obviously had not driven much. The truck jerked as he lifted his foot off the clutch. It stuttered. But it picked up speed eventually, until they had disappeared around the bend, taking my suitcase and Samuel’s ring and both pairs of shoes. Then I turned back toward Samuel.

He still had his eyes closed but was smiling. When he opened them, I was right there, also smiling. We started laughing. I felt wonderfully aware. I was amazed by my own beating heart and by the thin plume of dust that drifted off the road into the forest, fading into the dense undergrowth.