Then one night about halfway to the DRC, while they were sleeping hidden in the bush, they heard gunshots. The crowds leapt up and ran, but Bennett heard a voice speak directly to him, telling him to take a different route. Later he learned that hundreds of those who’d gone the opposite way had run directly into the ambush and been killed.

Again and again, God led Bennett through the rest of the journey this way. “Whatever direction I thought of going, we’d go there safely,” he said.

His family eventually settled into a refugee camp about eight miles outside the town of Dungu, in DRC, where the Sampsons were living. Bennett stayed in a small house in town to work on literacy and the Baka New Testament translation with Doug.

Before long the soldiers based in Dungu were becoming angry because they hadn’t been paid in several months. They decided to loot the town, and started shooting in the market near the translation office.

Bennett and Doug ran back to meet Anne at the Sampsons’ home. They just managed to hide the translation work and equipment through a loose panel in their ceiling before the soldiers arrived at their door. The soldiers shot a hole through the roof of their veranda, demanding that the Sampsons “open up, or else.”

When the Sampsons opened the door, the soldiers and dozens of locals ran inside and looted the home, carrying off everything of value they could find.

Doug and Anne moved into the refugee camp with Bennett and the other Baka refugees shortly after that, hoping it would be safer. But one night more soldiers crept into the refugee camp, and shot some of their neighbors.

“When the shooting started, Pastor Bennett and some other guys, without even thinking, grabbed their bows and arrows and came running to our compound to protect us,” Anne said. “They were willing to risk their lives for us. That really touched us.”

The Sampsons' home at the refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Protected for a Purpose

At one point when the war made it impossible for the the Sampsons to remain in the refugee camp, Bennett and a fellow Baka rode bicycles for two hundred miles to meet with them at a safer location in Uganda.

Still, they kept the project moving forward.

Then one day armed soldiers kidnapped Bennett from the translation office in DRC. He was one of nine held captive. One by one, each night the soldiers killed one of the prisoners with machetes.

“It was a terrible kind of killing that I witnessed,” Bennett said. “A person was tied, both legs and hands, and laid down. You could hear a human being screaming at the top of their voice, until … ”

For eight nights in a row, Bennett witnessed this brutality and awaited his own fate, until he was the only prisoner left.

At midnight, they came for him.

“One of the soldiers said, ‘Pastor, come. The commanders are calling you,’” Bennett remembers. “I thought, ‘They’re going to kill me … just like they killed the others.’” But with no explanation, the soldiers let him go.

“It’s hard for me to know why I was not killed,” he said. “Truly, God chose me to be a translator. Bringing the Word of God to my people is more important to me than all other things. I want them to hear God’s voice with their own ears. All the time I prayed, ‘God, speed this work so that they have a Bible and read your words, so that they go to heaven when the time comes for them.’”