Seven years: the biblical time of restoration, freedom, and jubilee. Seven times 70: the number of times Jesus told Peter to forgive his brother. Seven years, seven months: the time that Angelina Atyam’s daughter Charlotte was held captive after the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) abducted her and 138 other girls from a Catholic boarding school in 1996. Sevens surface as a motif throughout the transformation of “Mama Angelina” from a soft-spoken nurse-midwife and mother of six to an international activist seeking the release of all Uganda’s abducted children. […]

“In an interview over her kitchen table, Ms. Hall held up a photograph, taken when she was 5 and recovering from bone surgery, encased in a white plaster body cast from neck to toe, legs stiffened and splayed by a rod between her ankles. In the picture, her older brother, John, in a chest-cast himself from a polio operation (he died of respiratory complications at age 52) holds her up from behind. Huge grins illuminate their faces.”