Orphan Buys Orphanage

Orphan Buys Orphanage
DRC | December 21
Patrick Kayend Omughamay, 32

Have you ever been called a sorcerer? Everyone called 14-year-old Patrick Kayend Omughamay a sorcerer when his mother died.

Patrick was the oldest boy in a family of nine children in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His mother had supported the family, and the responsibility fell on him when she died unexpectedly.

Unable to work, Patrick went from house to house, begging for food. The neighbors, convinced that he was a sorcerer, refused to help. A year later, the authorities put Patrick in an orphanage, where he was fed and educated. But when he was 21, the orphanage closed, and he found himself back in his old neighborhood. People whispered, “The sorcerer is back.”

The next two years were the most difficult in his life. He filled plastic bags with drinking water and tried to sell them on the street. He spent hours thinking about life under a mango tree. The future seemed hopeless.

The only bright point in life was church, which he attended faithfully every Sabbath. His mother had been an Adventist.

One Sabbath, an Adventist physician, Jack Kavale, called a meeting of the young people. He offered to help anyone who had a viable idea for a small business. Patrick said he wanted to open an Internet cafe.

Jack said that would cost too much, but he offered U.S.$50 in seed money.

Wondering what to do, Patrick showed the money to a church elder.

“You should give tithe before anything else,” the elder said.

Patrick thought. “Is the elder against me? I don’t have enough money, and he is asking me to give tithe.”

The elder read from the Bible about giving tithe, and Patrick immediately handed over $5. The elder prayed for Patrick and said, “God go with you.”

Now Patrick had $45. After some thought, he bought a large umbrella, a table, and two broken cell phones that only made outgoing calls. He set up the table on the street and put a sign in front, reading, “Public telephone.” People would pay him to call on his phones.

Neighbors predicted failure.

“What kind of business is this?” they said. “It will never succeed.”

After expenses, Patrick earned only $2.50 a day. So, he borrowed a motorcycle and began offering taxi rides at night. After some time, he saved $300.

Then Patrick attended a meeting of businesspeople where a pastor asked for pledges to support evangelistic meetings in Kinshasa. To this day, Patrick doesn’t know why he pledged $200.

Neighbors thought he was foolish.

“How can you give $200?” they said. “What kind of work do you do now?”

A month passed, and Patrick began to worry that he had made a mistake.

One day, as Patrick stood at his cell phone table, a stranger walked up and offered a laptop for $120. Patrick thought that a laptop might help him expand his business, but he only had $80. The stranger rejected the offer as too small and left. After a while, however, he returned and accepted $80 for the laptop.

The next morning, another stranger rushed to Patrick’s table. “Do you know someone with a laptop for sale?” he said. “My friend wants to buy a laptop, and he is willing to spend $600.”

Patrick and the stranger went to the friend’s house. Seeing that the laptop worked, the friend asked for the price.

“$600,” Patrick said.

“I’ll give you $550,” the man said.

“Sold!” Patrick said.

Leaving the house, Patrick couldn’t believe what had happened. He had bought a laptop for $80 and sold it the next day for $550. After giving tithe, he upgraded his cell phone table to a wooden booth and began to offer money exchange services in addition the cell phone services. His business prospered. Soon he was earning $300 to $400 a week. Then revenues grew to $2,000.

Patrick bought the orphanage where he had once lived.

Today, he and his wife are raising six orphans in the orphanage and running a grade school on its premises. Street children are invited for free meals, and he has $50 for any widow in his church who as a viable idea for a small business.

Neighbors no longer call him a sorcerer.

“People said I was a sorcerer,” Patrick said. “But God has showed that I am His child.”

Thank you for your 2016 Thirteenth Sabbath Offering that helped construct children’s Sabbath School classrooms at three churches in Kinshasa, including the church that Patrick attends. Part of this quarter’s offering will help Kinshasa Adventist Clinic.

Andrew McChesney

Story Tips
Watch a YouTube video of Patrick: bit.ly/Patrick-Omughamay.
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/Orphan-Buys-Orphanage
Download high-resolution photos of Thirteenth Sabbath projects from ADAMS: bit.ly/ECD-projects-2019
Fast Facts
The Democratic Republic of Congo was known as Zaïre from 1971 to 1997.


“မိဘမဲ့လူငယ္ေလးကမိဘမဲ့ေက်ာင္းဝယ္ခဲ့တယ္”

ဒီဇင္ဘာလ(၂၁)ရက္၊ ေရးသားသူ-Patrick Kayend Omughaway(၃၂)ႏွစ္၊ကြန္ဂိုႏိုင္ငံ

(၁၄)ႏွစ္အ႐ြယ္ရွိတဲ့ “ပက္ထရစ္”ကို သူ႔အေမေသဆံုးတဲ့အခါ လူတိုင္းက ေမွာ္ဆရာလို႔
ေခၚခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။

“ပက္ထရစ္”တို႔မိသားစုဟာ ကြန္ဂိုႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ျမိဳ႕ေတာ္ ကင္ရွာစာျမိဳ႔မွာ ေနထိုင္ခဲ့ၾက
ပါတယ္။ “ပက္ထရစ္”ကေမာင္ႏွမကိုးေယာက္ထဲမွာ အၾကီးဆံုးျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ သူတို႔ရဲ႕အေမက
မိသားစုစားဝတ္ေနေရးအတြက္ေထာက္ပံ့ခဲ့ျပီး၊ မေမွ်ာ္လင့္တဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာသူမေသဆံုးသြားတဲ့အတြက္၊
မိသားစုရဲ႕တာဝန္ဟာ”ပက္ထရစ္”အေပၚက်ေရာက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အလုပ္လုပ္လို႔မရတဲ့အတြက္တအိမ္တက္တအိမ္ဆင္းအစားအစာ ေတာင္းခံခဲ့ပါတယ္။
အိမ္နီးနားခ်င္းေတြကသူ႔ကိုေမွာ္ဆရာလို႔ခံယူျပီးမကူညီခ်င္လိုၾကပါဘူး။

(၁)ႏွစ္ၾကာတဲ့အခါအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးအဖြဲ႕က မိဘမဲ့ေက်ာင္းမွာ”ပက္ထရစ္”ကိုထားခဲ့ၾကပါ
တယ္။ဒါေပမယ့္ သူ(၂၁)ႏွစ္အ႐ြယ္ေရာက္တဲ့အခါအဲဒီမိဘမဲ့ေက်ာင္းကိုပိတ္ပင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္
မို႔သူ႔အိမ္မွာဘဲသူျပန္ေနခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ သူ႔ကိုေမွာ္ဆရာျပန္လာျပီလို႔လူေတြကတီးတိုးေျပာဆိုခဲ့ၾက
ပါတယ္။

အဲဒီေနာက္(၂)ႏွစ္ဟာသူ႔အတြက္အခက္အခဲဆံုးအခ်ိန္ျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူဟာပလပ္စတစ္
အိတ္ထဲမွာေသာက္ေရသန္႔ထည့္ျပီးလမ္းမၾကီးေပၚမွာေရာင္းခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ သရက္ပင္တစ္ပင္ေအာက္
မွာထိုင္ျပီး သူ႔ရဲ႕ဘဝကိုအၾကာၾကီးစဥ္းစားေတြးေတာခဲ့မိပါတယ္။ သူ႔ရဲ႕အနာဂတ္ဟာလံုးဝေမွ်ာ္
လင့္ခ်က္မရွိသလိုျဖစ္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။

သူ႔ရဲ႕အေမဟာေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းသူျဖစ္ျပီး၊အေမနဲ႔အတူသစၥာရွိရွိဥပုသ္ေန႔တိုင္း
ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ဘုရားေက်ာင္းမွာတက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။အဲဒီအခ်ိန္ကသူ႔ရဲ႕ဘဝဟာ
သာယာလွပခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဥပုသ္ေန႔တစ္ေန႔မွာ၊ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းဆရာဝန္ျဖစ္တီဲ့အေနနဲ႔လူငယ္ေတြ
ကိုစည္း႐ံုးျပီးအစည္းအေဝးေခၚခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေသးငယ္တဲ့စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ဖို႔အၾကံအစည္ရွိသူေတြကို
ကူညီဖို႔ကမ္းလွမ္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။ “ပက္ထရစ္”အေနနဲ႔အင္တာနက္ဆိုင္ဖြင့္လိုေၾကာင္းတင္ျပခဲ့ပါတယ္။

Dr. Jackကအကုန္အက်မ်ားလြန္းတယ္လို႔ေျပာခဲ့ေပမယ့္၊လုပ္ငန္းစတင္ဖို႔အတြက္အေမရိ
ကန္ေဒၚလာ(၅၀)နဲ႔ကူညီမစခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဘယ္လိုလုပ္ရမွန္းမသိတဲ့အတြက္ “ပက္ထရစ္”ဟာအသင္းလူၾကီးကိုပိုက္ဆံျပလိုက္ပါ
တယ္။အသင္းလူၾကီးကလည္း”ဒီပိုက္ဆံနဲ႔တခုခုမလုပ္ခင္မွာဆယ္ဖို႔တဖို႔ကိုအရင္ေပးရမယ္ေနာ္”
လို႔ေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။

“ပက္ထရစ္”က၊”ကြ်န္ေတာ့မွာလံုေလာက္တဲ့ပိုက္ဆံမရွိပဲနဲ႔ဆယ္ဖို႔တစ္ဖို႔ေပးခိုင္းတာ
ဟာမနာလိုလို႔လား” လို႔စဥ္းစားမိခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အသင္းလူၾကီးက မာလခိ ၃း၈-၁၂ ကိုဖတ္ျပလိုက္တဲ့အခါ ခ်က္ခ်င္းပဲ”ပက္ထရစ္”က
အေမရိကန္ေငြ(၅)ေဒၚလာအသင္းလူၾကီးလက္ထဲမွာေပးအပ္လိုက္ပါတယ္။အသင္းလူၾကီးကလဲ
“ပက္ထရစ္”ရဲ႕စီးပြားေရးစီမံကိန္းအတြက္ဆုေတာင္းေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။”သင့္ရဲ႕စီးပြားေရးစီမံကိန္းအေပၚ
ဘုရားေကာင္းခ်ီးခ်ေပးပါေစ”လို႔အားေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ယခုအခါ”ပက္ထရစ္”လက္ထဲမွာပိုက္ဆံ(၄၅)ေဒၚလာရွိေနပါျပီ..။ သူဟာသူလုပ္ရမဲ့အ
ရာကိုစဥ္းစားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီေနာက္ထီးအၾကီးတစ္လက္၊စားပြဲတစ္လံုး၊ဖုန္းႏွစ္လံုးဝယ္ယူခဲ့ပါတယ္။
လမ္းမေပၚမွာစားပြဲတလံုးခ်ျပီးဖုန္းကိုတင္ကာ၊”အမ်ားျပည္သူသံုးတယ္လီဖုန္း”ဆိုျပီးခ်ိတ္ဆြဲခဲ့ပါ
တယ္။ အဲဒီဖုန္းကိုသံုးရင္လူအမ်ားကဖုန္းသံုးခေပးရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အကုန္အက်စာရင္းတြက္ျပီးမွ”ပက္ထရစ္”ဟာတစ္ရက္ကို၂.၅၀ေဒၚလာဘဲရရွိခဲ့ပါ
တယ္။ဒါေၾကာင့္”ပက္ထရစ္”ဟာေမာ္ေတာ္ဆိုက္ကယ္တစီးကိုငွားရမ္းျပီး၊ညဖက္မွာလူေတြကိုအခယူ
ျပီးတင္စီးခိုင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။အဲဒီအလုပ္ကေနေဒၚလာ၃၀ဝ စုႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

စီးပြားေရးသမားမ်ားရဲ႕အစည္းအေဝးတခုမွာ ကင္ရွာစာျမိဳ႕ရဲ႕ တရားပြဲတခုအတြက္ေဒၚ
လာ၂၀ဝေပးလွဴဖို႔ ကတိေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဘာျဖစ္လို႔ဒီကတိေပးခဲ့ရသလဲဆိုတာယေန႔အထိသူမသိ
ခဲ့ပါဘူး။

အိမ္နီးခ်င္းေတြက “ေဒၚလာ၂၀ဝေပးရေအာင္ သူကဘာအလုပ္လုပ္လို႔လဲ”ဆိုျပီးေမးခဲ့ၾက
ပါတယ္။ တစ္လၾကာတဲ့အခါသူေပးခဲ့တဲ့ကတိအတြက္စိုးရိမ္ခဲ့မိပါတယ္။

တစ္ေန႔က်ေတာ့၊သူ႔ရဲ႕ဖုန္းတင္ထားတဲ့စားပြဲနားမွာ၊ လူစိမ္းတစ္ဦးေရာက္လာျပီးလက္ဆြဲ
ကြန္ျပဴတာကိုေဒၚလာ၁၂၀နဲ႔လာေရာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။”ပက္ထရစ္”အေနနဲ႔သူ႔စီးပြားေရးအတြက္အ
ေထာက္အကူျဖစ္မယ္ထင္ျပီး၊ ေဒၚလာ၈၀နဲ႔ေဈးဆစ္လိုက္ပါတယ္။လူစိမ္းကျပန္လွည့္လာျပီးေဒၚ
လာ၈၀နဲ႔ေရာင္းလိုက္ပါတယ္။

ေနာက္တေန႔မနက္မွာလဲ၊အျခားလူစိမ္းတစ္ဦးက”ပက္ထရစ္”ရဲ႕ဖုန္းဆက္တဲ့စားပြဲ
နားမွာေရာက္လာျပီး၊”လက္ဆြဲကြန္ျပဴတာေရာင္းတဲ့သူရွိရင္ကြ်န္ေတာ့သူငယ္ခ်င္းကေဒၚလာ၆၀ဝနဲ႕
ဝယ္ခ်င္”လို႔ဆိုျပီးေျပာလာပါတယ္။သူတို႔ႏွစ္ဦးဟာ “ပက္ထရစ္”အိမ္မွာသြားျပီးကြန္ျပဴတာကိုစမ္း
သပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။လူစိမ္း၂ဦးဟာေဒၚလာ၅၅၀နဲ႔ေဈးတည့္ကာ ပက္ထရစ္ထံမွကြန္ျပဴတာကိုဝယ္ယူ
ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

“ပက္ထရစ္”အေနနဲ႔အရာအားလံုးကိုမယံုၾကည္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ဆယ္ဖို႔တစ္ဖို႔
ေပးျပီးတဲ့ေနာက္ ေငြလဲလွယ္မႈကိုလည္းထပ္လုပ္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ပိုေကာင္းတဲ့စားပြဲတစ္လံုးကိုဝယ္ခဲ့ျပန္
ပါတယ္။သူ႔ရဲ႕စီးပြားေရးဟာအရမ္းတိုးတက္လာျပီး၊အပတ္တိုင္းေဒၚလာ၃၀ဝကေန ၄၀ဝအထိရရွိ
ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ဆက္လက္ျပီးေဒၚလာ၂၀ဝ၀ အထိတိုးတက္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဒါနဲ႔”ပက္ထရစ္”ဟာသူေနခဲ့ဘူးတဲ့ မိဘမဲ့ေက်ာင္းကိုဝယ္ယူလိုက္ပါတယ္။ ယေန႔၊သူနဲ႔
သူ႕ဇနီးသည္ဟာမိဘမဲ့ေက်ာင္းမွာကေလး၆ေယာက္ကိုေကြ်းေမြးျပဳစုျပီး၊ပထမတန္းအထိကိုယ္ပိုင္
ေက်ာင္းေလးကိုလည္းဖြင့္လွစ္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါျပီ။

လမ္းေပၚမွာေယာင္ခ်ာခ်ာျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ကေလးေတြကိုေခၚဖိတ္ျပီးအစာေကြ်းေမြးခဲ့ပါ
တယ္။ စီးပြားေရးအေသးစားေလးလုပ္မဲ့သူမုဆိုးမတစ္ဦးဦးကိုလည္းေဒၚလာ၅၀ေပးဖို႔စီစဥ္ထားခဲ့ပါ
တယ္။

ယခုအခ်ိန္မွာ”ပက္ထရစ္”ကိုအိမ္နီးခ်င္းေတြကေမွာ္ဆရာလို႔မေခၚေတာ့ပါဘူး။”ဘုရား
သခင္ဟာကြ်န္ေတာ့ကိုသူ႔ရဲ႕သားျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း”ျပသခဲ့ပါတယ္။

“ပက္ထရစ္”တက္ေနတဲ့ဘုရားေက်ာင္းအပါအဝင္၊ကင္ရွာစာမွာ ရွိတဲ့အသင္းေတာ္သံုးပါး
မွာကေလးတန္းဥပုသ္စာေျဖေက်ာင္းအတြက္အခန္းေတြကို၊၂၀၁၆ခုႏွစ္(၁၃)ပတ္အလွဴေငြတခ်ိဳ႕နဲ႔
တည္ေဆာက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဒီကြာတာရဲ႕ (၁၃)ပတ္အလွဴေငြတခ်ိဳ႕ကိုေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းေဆးခန္းတည္ေဆာက္ရာမွာအ
သံုးျပဳမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။သင္တို႔ရဲ႕ရက္ေရာစြာထည့္ဝင္သြားတဲ့အလွဴေငြေတြအတြက္အထူးေက်းဇူးတင္
ပါတယ္။
-ဝ-

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