One Leg for 25 Souls
KENYA | October 5
Phylis Odindo, 45
Asharp pain shot up Phylis Odindo’s right leg in 2017.
The pain grew unbearable. Phylis went to the main government hospital in Kisumu, Kenya, but no one could help. The medical staff were on strike.
With no money and few options, Phylis sought treatment at a small clinic. The doctor didn’t have the medical equipment to do an X-ray. He looked at her leg and recommended that it be amputated.
Phylis, a widow with a young adult son, didn’t want to lose her leg, so she returned home. But the pain didn’t subside, and she returned to the clinic. The doctor amputated her leg just below the knee.
Three weeks later, Phylis fell very ill. She couldn’t move.
She went to the main hospital for an X-ray, and the doctor declared that the wound on her leg had started to rot. It had spread far above her knee. He called for a second amputation on the same leg.
Phylis was hospitalized after the surgery. Her health deteriorated so much that she lost hope. She called Anna, the Women’s Ministry director at her Kenya-Re Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Anna took one look at Phylis and felt certain that she was at death’s door. Anna prayed. After the prayer, Phylis felt stronger and asked Anna to keep praying for her. Anna agreed and gave her something to drink.
The next day, Anna returned to the hospital with several other women from the church. They came back the next day, and the next. The church pastor and elders also visited to offer encouragement and prayer.
On her hospital bed, Phylis prayed.
“Have mercy on me, O God, because I have only one son,” she prayed.
Her son, whom she had raised alone, had left the Adventist Church after her husband died 11 years earlier. He was angry with his late father’s relatives for seizing his mother’s house and all their possessions after the death. In parts of Kenya, the wife is held responsible for the husband’s wellbeing, and she is blamed if he dies. Phylis’ in-laws blamed her for her husband’s death and took all her property.
The church members visited Phylis every day during the three months that she stayed in the hospital. They helped pay her medical bills and obtain health insurance.
When she returned to her rented home, the church members continued to visit regularly and help with her daily needs.
Then something amazing happened. Eight hospital patients asked to be baptized. They were so touched by the compassion shown to Phylis by her church friends that they wanted to join her church. After that, seven married couples living in Phylis’ neighborhood asked to be baptized. They also were touched by the church members’ loving care. When Phylis’ mother came from across the country to visit, the Women’s Ministry department from the Kenya-Re church threw a surprise prayer breakfast for Phylis in her home. Phylis’ mother, a staunch member of another Christian denomination, was so impressed that she announced that she wanted to become an Adventist. She and one of Phylis’ sisters were later baptized.
Making Phylis’ joy complete, her son was baptized and got married at the Kenya-Re church in 2018.
In all, 25 people have been baptized since Phylis lost her leg. Phylis thinks that is a wonderful exchange.
“I praise God that my son has come back to church because of the amputation,” she said. “I may only have one leg, but it has brought many spiritual benefits to me and my family. It also has brought 25 people to God.”
Part of this quarter’s Thirteenth Sabbath Offering will help construct a Seventh-day Adventist hospital in Phylis’ hometown, Kisumu. Thank you for planning to give a generous offering to promote physical and spiritual health in Kenya.
Story Tips
Sing Phylis’ favorite hymn “Does Jesus Care?” in the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal, No. 181.
Read Phylis’ favorite Bible passage, Psalms 23.
Download medium-resolution photos for this story from our Facebook page: bit.ly/fb-mq. Photos are uploaded on Sundays, six days before the mission story is to be presented.
Download high-resolution photos and more from the ADAMS databank: bit.ly/one-leg-25
Download high-resolution photos of Thirteenth Sabbath projects from ADAMS: bit.ly/ECD-projects-2019
Mission Post
The first Seventh-day Adventist missionary to Kenya was Canadian-born A.A. Carscallen, who arrived from Britain in 1906. Within 14 months, Carscallen reported that he had constructed basic mission buildings and had learned the Luo language, which had never before been written down. Later, he made a Luo translation of the Gospel of Matthew, which was accepted for publication in 1913 by the British and Foreign Bible Society of London.
The Adventist University of East Africa, Baraton (UEAB) was established in 1980 and became the first private university to be chartered by the government of Kenya in 1991. UEAB has both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in business, education, health sciences, and science and technology
ဝိညာဥ္၂၅လံုးအတြက္ေျခေထာက္တစ္ေခ်ာင္း
ေအာက္တိုဘာလ(၅)ရက္၊ ေရးသားသူ-ဖိလီ(စ)အိုဒင္ဒို-၄၅ႏွစ္၊ကင္ယာႏိုင္ငံ၊
၂၀၁၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္၊ဖိလီး(စ)အိုဒင္ဒိုရဲ႕ လက်ာ္ဖက္ေျခေထာက္ဟာအရမ္းပဲနာက်င္ခဲ့ပါ
တယ္။ အနာဟာသည္းမခံႏိုင္ေလာက္ေအာင္ပိုမိုဆိုးရြားလာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ကင္ယာႏိုင္ငံ၊ကီဆိုမူျမိဳ႕မွာ
ရွိတဲ့အစိုးရျပည္သူ႔ေဆး႐ံုမွာေဆးကုသခဲ့ပါတယ္။ဒါေပမဲ့၊အနာမသက္သာလို႔ေဆး႐ံုဝန္ထမ္းေတြရဲ႕
စိတ္ကိုပိုမိုထိခိုက္ေစခဲ့ပါတယ္။
လက္ထဲမွာေငြမရွိဘဲနဲ႔အနာကိုေဆးခန္းမွာသြားျပခဲ့မိပါတယ္။အဲဒီေဆးခန္းမွာေျခေထာက္
ကိုဓါတ္မွန္႐ိုက္ဖို႔ကရိယာအစံုမရွိခဲ့ပါ။ ဆရာဝန္ကလူနာရဲ႕ေျခေထာက္ကိုၾကည့္ျပီးျဖတ္ပစ္ဖို႔သာ
ေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
မုဆိုးမဖိလီး(စ)မွာအ႐ြယ္ေရာက္တဲ့သားငယ္ေလးတစ္ေယာက္ရွိတဲ့အတြက္၊ေျခ
ေထာက္မျဖတ္ခ်င္လို႔အိမ္ကိုျပန္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ဒါေပမဲ့၊အနာဟာလံုးဝမသက္သာတဲ့အတြက္ေဆးခန္း
ကိုျပန္လာျပခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ဆရာဝန္ကလည္းသူမရဲ႕ေျခေထာက္ကို ဒူးရဲ႕ေအာက္ပိုင္းအထိျဖတ္ပစ္
လိုက္ပါတယ္။
သံုးပတ္ၾကာလာတဲ့အခါ၊သူမဟာအသည္းအသန္အလြန္အမင္းဖ်ားခဲ့ျပီးသြားလာလို႔
မရေတာ့ပါ။ ဓါတ္မွန္႐ိုက္ဖို႔ျပည္သူ႔ေဆး႐ံုၾကီးမွာသြားတဲ့အခါ၊ဆရာဝန္က သူမရဲ႕ေျခေထာက္အ
နာဟာေဆြးေျမ႕ေနေၾကာင္း၊ဒူးရဲ႕အေပၚပိုင္းအထိကူးစက္ေနေၾကာင္းနဲ႔ ေနာက္တစ္ၾကိမ္ျပန္ျဖတ္
ပစ္ရမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းဆရာဝန္ကေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဖီလီး(စ)ဟာ သူမရဲ႕ေျခေထာက္အနာကိုျဖတ္ပစ္ျပီးတဲ့ေနာက္မွာ ေဆးကုသမႈဆက္လက္
ခံယူခဲ့ပါတယ္။သူမရဲ႕ ေျခေထာက္အနာဟာ ပိုမိုဆိုးရြားလာခဲ့ျပီး၊ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္လံုးဝမရွိေတာ့
သေလာက္ေတာ္ေတာ္စိတ္ပ်က္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူမအေနနဲ႔၊ ကင္ယာႏိုင္ငံ ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းသာသနာ
အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္မွာအမ်ိဳးသမီးဌာနညႊန္ၾကားေရးမွဴးျဖစ္တဲ့ ဆရာမၾကီးအန္နာကို အထူးဆုေတာင္းေပးဖို႔
ဖိတ္ေခၚခဲ့ပါတယ္။
အန္နာကဖီလီ(စ)ကိုၾကည့္တဲ့အခါ ေသႏိုင္တဲ့အေျခအေနေရာက္ႏိုင္ေၾကာင္းေတြ႕ရွိျပီး
ဆုေတာင္းေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဆုေတာင္းေပးျပီးေနာက္ ဖီလီ(စ)ဟာပိုမိုျပီးအားရွိလာတဲ့အတြက္ဆက္
လက္ဆုေတာင္းေပးရန္အန္နာကိုေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။အန္နာလည္းပဲသေဘာတူျပီးဖီလီ(စ)ကိုေဖ်ာ္
ရည္ေသာက္ခိုင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ေနာက္တစ္ေန႔မွာ၊အန္နာဟာအမ်ိဳးသမီးတစ္ဖြဲ႔နဲ႔ေဆး႐ံုမွာရွိတဲ့ဖီလီ(စ)ထံလာ
လည္ပတ္ျပီးဆုေတာင္းေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အျခားေန႔ေတြမွာလည္း အသင္းအုပ္ဆရာနဲ႔အသင္းလူ
ၾကီးမ်ားလာလည္ပတ္ျပီးဖီလီ(စ)”အတြက္ဆုေတာင္းေပးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။
ဖီလီ(စ)ကိုယ္တိုင္လည္းပဲ သူမရဲ႕ကုတင္ေပၚမွာပဲ၊”အဖဘုရား၊ကြ်န္မကသားတစ္ေယာက္
ပဲရွိတဲ့အတြက္ျပန္လည္က်န္းမာလာဖို႔ကူညီမစေတာ္မူပါ”လို႔ဆုေတာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။
သူမရဲ႕အမ်ိဳးသားေသဆံုးျပီးေနာက္ အမ်ိဳးသားရဲ႕ညီအစ္ကိုေတြက သူတို႔ပိုင္ဆိုင္တဲ့အိမ္
နဲ႔အရာခပ္သိမ္းကိုသိမ္းပိုက္လိုက္လို႔၊သူမရဲ႕သားဟာစိတ္ဆိုးျပီးအသင္းေတာ္ကေနထြက္သြားခဲ့ပါ
တယ္။ ကင္ယာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕တစ္ခ်ိဳ႕ေနရာေတြမွာ ဇနီးသည္ကခင္ပြန္းသည္ရဲ႕က်န္းမာေရးကိုဂ႐ုစိုက္
ၾကည့္႐ႈဖို႔တာဝန္ရွိျပီးေသဆံုးပါက အျပစ္တင္ျခင္းခံရပါသည္။
ျပည့္သူ႔ေဆး႐ံုမွာ “ဖီလီ(စ)”ဟာသံုးလၾကာေဆးကုသမႈယူသည့္အခ်ိန္တြင္အသင္းသား
မ်ားက ေန႔တိုင္းလာေရာက္ဆုေတာင္းေပးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ဒါ့အျပင္သူမရဲ႕ေဆးကုသမႈကုန္က်စရိတ္
အားလံုးကိုအသင္းေတာ္မွရွင္းေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ေဆး႐ံုကေနဆင္းျပီး သူမငွားေနတဲ့အိမ္မွာလည္းေန႔
တိုင္းသြားေရာက္ဆုေတာင္းေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူမရဲ႕လိုအပ္ခ်က္ေတြကိုဆက္လက္ကူညီေပးခဲ့ၾက
ပါတယ္။
အဲဒါနဲ႔၊အလြန္မွပင္အံ့ဩစရာေကာင္းတဲ့အရာတစ္ခုျဖစ္ပ်က္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေဆး႐ံုမွာေဆးကု
သမႈခံယူေနတဲ့လူနာ(၈)ဦးတို႔ကေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္မ်ာ ေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံယူဖို႔ေဆာင္းဆိုခဲ့ၾက
ပါတယ္။”ဖီလီ(စ)” အေပၚအသင္းသားမ်ားရဲ႕သနားၾကင္နာမႈကိုေတြ႔ျမင္ျပီး၊သူတို႔ရဲ႕စိတ္ႏွလံုးသား
ကိုထိမိျပီးသူမရဲ႕အသင္းေတာ္ထဲမွာဝင္ခ်င္ၾကပါတယ္။အဲဒီေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာလည္း “ဖီလီ(စ)ရဲ႕အိမ္နီး
နားခ်င္းေတြျဖစ္တဲ့လင္မယား(၇)တြဲကလည္း ေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံဖို႔ေတာင္းဆိုလာခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။သူတို႔
တေတြလည္းအသင္းသားေတြရဲ႕ၾကင္နာသနားမႈေၾကာင့္ သူတို႔ႏွလံုးသားကိုထိမိလို႔ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
“ဖီလီ(စ)” ရဲ႕အေမဟာေဝးလံတဲ့ျမိဳ႕ကေနသူ႕သမီးထံသို႔ေရာက္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ကင္ယာႏိုင္ငံေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းသာသနာအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္မွအမ်ိဳးသမီးေတြဟာသူမနဲ႔အတူ”ဖီလီ(စ)”ေနတဲ့အိမ္မွာ
နံနက္စာကိုအတူတကြစားေသာက္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ဖီလီ(စ) ရဲ႕အေမဟာအျခားဂိုဏ္းဂဏဝင္ျဖစ္ျပီး
ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ကိုဆန္႔က်င္သူျဖစ္ခဲ့ေပမဲ့၊အသင္းသားေတြရဲ႕ ဖီလီ(စ)အေပၚသနား
ၾကင္နာမႈကို ေတြ႔ျမင္လိုက္ရတဲ့အခါ သူမရဲ႕ႏွလံုးသားကိုထိမိျပီးအသင္းသူျဖစ္ခ်င္ခဲ့မိပါတယ္။
အဲဒီေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာသူမဟာ ဖီလီ(စ)ရဲ႕ညီမေတြနဲ႔ေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံယူခဲ့ပါတယ္။
၂၀ဝ၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ကင္ယာႏိုင္ငံေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ရဲ႕ဘုရားေက်ာင္းမွာသူမရဲ႕
သားလည္းေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံယူျပီး၊အိမ္ေထာင္ျပဳခဲ့တဲ့အတြက္ဖီလီ(စ)ရဲ႕ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္မႈဟာျပည့္စံုသြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဖီလီ(စ)ဟာေျခေထာက္ျဖတ္ျပီးခဲ့အခ်ိန္ကေန ယေန႔အထိဝိညာဥ္၂၅လံုးရရွိခဲ့ပါျပီ….။
ဖီလီ(စ)အေနနဲ႔အင္မတန္မွအံ့ဩစရာေတာင္းတဲ့အရာတခုလို႔စဥ္းစားခဲ့မိပါတယ္။
“က်မရဲ႕ေျခေထာက္ေၾကာင့္က်မသားဟာအသင္းေတာ္ထဲသို႔ျပန္ဝင္လာတဲ့အတြက္
ဘုရားသခင္ကိုေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္။က်မမွာေျခေထာက္တစ္ဖက္သာရွိေပမဲ့၊ကြ်န္မနဲ႔က်မရဲ႕မိသားစု
အေပၚမွာဝိညာဥ္ေရးပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာအက်ိဳးေက်းဇူးမ်ားစြာကိုခံစားရရွိခဲ့ပါတယ္။တန္ဖိုးျဖတ္လို႔မရတဲ့
ဝိညာဥ္(၂၅)လံုးကိုလည္းဘုရားထံသို႔ပို႔ေဆာင္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္”လို႔ အားရဝမ္းသာစြာျဖင့္ဖီလီ(စ)
ကေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဒီကြာတာရဲ႕ ၁၃ ပတ္အလွဴေငြတစ္ခ်ိဳ႕ကိုဖီလီ(စ)ေနထိုင္တဲ့ ဳင်ကာက ျမိဳ႕ရွိေျမာ္လင့္
ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ေဆး႐ံုတည္ေဆာက္ရာမွာအသံုးျပဳမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ကင္ယာႏိုင္ငံမ်ာေနထိုင္တဲ့
လူေတြရဲ႕ဝိညာဥ္ေရးဆိုင္ရာ၊ကိုယ္ကာယဆိုင္ရာက်န္းမာေရးပိုင္းမွာတိုးတက္လာေအာင္ ရက္ေရာစြာ
ထည့္ဝင္သြားတဲ့အလွဴေတြအတြက္အထူးေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္။
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