The Heart Behind the Mission
Personal Testimony from Founder Samuel Pyle
When I was young, my home country, Sierra Leone, was in the middle of a brutal civil war that lasted from 1991 to 2002. In order to defend ourselves against the rebels who were killing innocent civilians, my father left to join a local para-military organization called Ca-major that was involved in fighting the rebels, and he was away from home in the war for more than three months. Since he was the one who was providing food for my family, everyone was hungry. It was impossible to find food in the local area and when my aunt went some distance searching for food, she was capture by the rebels, raped, brutally tortured, and killed.
We were scared and desperate. There was no food, and my mother was pregnant with my younger brother. If we were lucky enough to have breakfast, there would be no more food for the rest of the day. It was a distant dream to think about being able to eat two or three times in a day, as I had heard other people did. The extreme hunger and dehydration weakened people’s resistance to diseases such as malaria. The water supply was contaminated which led to the spread of typhoid fever, and many people were dying around us. In their desperation, many people turned to witchcraft for self-preservation and revenge. Because of the lack of medical resources and caregivers, many people also sought medical treatment from a local witch doctor. I used to pray that God would protect our family from witchcraft and sickness.
One day my father came back, but because of the terrible conditions at the ca-major camp and the battlefield, he became very sick and he was no longer able to provide for us. When I was seven, my father died. My mother tried to give us a life, but she had just given birth and had also become very sick. There were five of us children; we were unable to pay rent, and we had no money for food. My older brother and older sister went to live with other family members in the village. During this time my mother became very sick; she had no options to provide for the remaining four members of our family. She was afraid of the demands of witchcraft, which demanded that she sacrifice one of her children, so she decided to take me, my brother, and my sister to an orphanage so that we could have food and be protected from the local witches who wanted to kill us.
We stayed at the orphanage for 10 years; the conditions were better than the village, but they were not that great. We usually had food once a day, but some days we did not have any food at all. During these years I did not get the opportunity to go to school.
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After 10 years, my two younger siblings and I were fortunate to get adopted by a family from Oldham County, Kentucky. I went to high school for three years and graduated from Hanover College in 2020.
Now I feel privileged, because I have gone to high school, have graduated from college, and do not have to worry about food anymore. Since I have been blessed with all these opportunities that are not available to the people of Sierra Leone, I want to help children in that country who are now in the same situation that I was in. I also want to help families who are right now experiencing similar conditions to those my family experienced. Therefore, I started a nonprofit in order to feed the hungry and change the lives of families and children in Sierra Leone. The name of the organization is Looking Back Moving Forward. In 2018 the organization was founded and was able to provide fifty-pound bags of rice to one hundred families in Sierra Leone. Each bag feeds a family of five for a whole month during the raining season. Since then, the organization has continued to grow and currently has programs to distribute rice, celebrate Christmas, emergency relief, soccer programs, summer camp, and sharing the Jesus movie in villages. Since 2018, Looking Back Moving Forward has served thousands of people across the country of Sierra Leone through its programming.