Sister Act
RWANDA | November 23
Yvonne Mushimiyimana, 27
vonne Mushimiyimana eagerly signed up to sing at her high school’s music concert.
She borrowed tight-fitting clothes from her friends. She chose colorful makeup to make sure that the audience noticed her on stage. Then she sang with all her heart.
Afterward, students crowded around her.
“Why were you burying your talent?” asked one.
“Stop wearing long skirts,” said another. “The clothing of Seventh-day Adventist girls does not match your beauty or your sweet voice.”
Yvonne loved the praise, and she readily accepted requests from her new friends to stay for a dance party after the concert. Many of her Adventist classmates, however, left after the concert to attend Friday evening worship services at church.
On Sabbath morning, Yvonne went to church as usual. But church leaders learned that she and four other Adventist teens had gone to the dance party. All five students were punished. Four asked forgiveness and promised not to break the Sabbath again, but Yvonne refused to apologize.
“I can’t,” she told the pastor. “I want to continue singing and dancing.”
She stopped going to church on Sabbaths. She changed her clothing style and the way she walked. Everywhere she went, people stopped to look. Soon she became one of the most popular girls in school.
Her popularity soared even higher when she started to compose her own songs. Her first song became a big hit on campus, and she smiled happily when she heard students and teachers listening to it.
Yvonne’s new life kept her very busy, and she began to skip classes. Still, she passed final exams with high marks. Astonished teachers asked how she had managed to get good grades without attending classes. She didn’t know what to say, but she secretly thought that the reason must be that her mother was praying for her.
At the university in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, Yvonne worked hard to become a pop star. She called herself Sister Yvonne and recorded songs in professional music studios. She made music videos and performed in bars and night clubs. She further tweaked her clothing and makeup to match the flirty style of pop stars. She wore three earrings in each ear and a stud in her nose. She got tattoos.
Her parents, who stayed back at home in eastern Rwanda, were sad, and Father stopped sending money. But Yvonne didn’t back down. When she realized that she didn’t earn enough money from concerts to pay her bills, she tried selling women’s clothing at a city market. Then she took a job as a kindergarten teacher.
The children were impressed when Yvonne showed up at the kindergarten dressed in cut-off jeans shorts and decked out in jewelry. At home, the children begged their shocked mothers for tattoos and nose studs. When the mothers learned that their children had been inspired by their new teacher, they flocked to the kindergarten to complain.
The steady stream of complaints saddened Yvonne, and she lived for the weekends when she could dance at night clubs. But the dancing didn’t take away her sadness. She didn’t know what to do.
One day, she was sitting at home when she heard a sermon being preached over loudspeakers at a nearby Seventh-day Adventist church. She didn’t want to hear the sermon. She slammed shut her bedroom door and turned on loud music.
The next day, the preacher gave another sermon. Then he preached for a third day. The nearby Ruyenzi Seventh-day Adventist Church was conducting a three-week evangelistic series.
Finally, Yvonne gave up and listened to a sermon from her home. The preacher’s words warmed her heart, and she began to attend the meetings in the church. She was baptized at the last meeting, and she dedicated her voice to God.
Today, Yvonne is 27 and a teacher. She also is a gospel singer who composes songs to glorify God, and is the single women’s leader in her church.
“I thank God for keeping me safe when I went my own way,” she said. “Had it not been for his protection, I could be dead by now.”
She is especially grateful to her parents for raising her with biblical values. She sees truth in Proverbs 22:6, which says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
“I’m sure my mother’s teachings in my childhood helped,” she said. “Even though I drifted from God, my mother’s words remained in my heart.”
Andrew McChesney
Story Tips
Pronounce Yvonne as: yev-ON
Watch a YouTube video of Yvonne: bit.ly/Sister-Yvonne.
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/Sister-Act-Yvonne
Download high-resolution photos of Thirteenth Sabbath projects from ADAMS: bit.ly/ECD-projects-2019
Fast Facts
A dramatic improvement in healthcare delivery and health outcomes has seen life expectancy in Rwanda rise by ten years in the last decade.
“ညီမရဲ႕လုပ္ရပ္”
ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ(၂၃)ရက္၊ ေရးသားသူ-Yvonne Mushimiyimana(၂၇)ႏွစ္၊
Yvonne ဟာ သူမအထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းရဲ႕ ေတးဂီတေဖ်ာ္ေျဖမႈမွာသီခ်င္းဆိုဖို႔စိတ္
အားထက္သန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
သူမကသူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြနဲ႔၊ တင္းက်ပ္တဲ့အက်ႌေတြကိုငွားဝတ္ျပီးအလွျပင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ျပီးေတာ့၊ႏွလံုးသားကေန သီခ်င္းဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။
အဲဒါနဲ႔၊ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြက သူမအနားမွာစုေဝးလာျပီးေတာ့၊”ဘာျဖစ္လို႔သင့္ရဲ႕အစြမ္း
ကိုဖံုးကြယ္ထားရတာလဲ” လို႔တစ္ေယာက္ကေမးျမန္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။
အျခားတစ္ေယာက္ကေတာ့၊”ထမိန္အရွည္မဝတ္ေတာ့နဲ႔။ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ရဲ႕ဝတ္
စားဆင္ယင္ပံုကသင့္ရဲ႕အလွနဲ႔ျဖစ္ျဖစ္၊ေကာင္းတဲ့အသံနဲ႔ျဖစ္ျဖစ္မလိုက္ဖက္ဘူး”လို႔ေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
Yvonne ဟာ ခ်ီးမြမ္းျခင္းကိုႏွစ္သက္ျပီး၊အဲဒီေဖ်ာ္ေျဖမႈျပီးတဲ့ေနာက္မွာသူမရဲ႕သူငယ္
ခ်င္းအသစ္ေတြက၊ကပြဲအတြက္ဆက္လက္ေနသြားဖို႔ ေတာင္းဆိုမႈကိုလက္ခံခဲ့ပါတယ္။သူမအတန္း
ေဖာ္ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းေက်ာင္းသူေတြကေတာ့ ဘုရားေက်ာင္းမွာ ေသာၾကာေန႔ညဝတ္ျပဳျခင္းအစီအစဥ္
၌တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။
ခါတိုင္းလိုပဲ ဥပုသ္ေတာ္ေန႔နံနက္ပိုင္းမွာYvonneဟာဘုရားေက်ာင္းတက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမယ့္၊သူမနဲ႔ အျခားေက်ာင္းသူေလးေယာက္တို႔ဟာ ကပြဲမွာသြားခဲ့ေၾကာင္းကိုအသင္းေတာ္
ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြကၾကားသိခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ေက်ာင္းသူငါးေယာက္ကိုအျပစ္ေပးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ေနာက္
ထပ္ဥပုသ္ေတာ္ေန႔ကို မက်ဴးလြန္ဖို႔နဲ႔အျပစ္ခြင့္လႊတ္ဖို႔ေက်ာင္းသူေလးေယာက္ကကတိဝန္ခံေပ
မဲ့၊Yvonne ကေတာ့ေတာင္းပန္ဖို႔ျငင္းဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။
“ကြ်န္မကတိဝန္ခံခ်က္မေပးႏိုင္ဘူး။ကြ်န္မဆက္လက္ျပီး၊သီခ်င္းဆိုျပီးကခ်င္ပါတယ္”လို႕
အသင္းအုပ္ဆရာကိုေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဥပုသ္ေတာ္ေန႔တိုင္း သူမဟာ ဘုရားေက်ာင္းမတက္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။သူမအေနနဲ႔ဝတ္စား
ဆင္ယင္ပံုနဲ႔လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ပံုကိုေျပာင္းလဲခဲ့ပါေတာ့တယ္။ သူမသြားတဲ့ေနရာတိုင္းမွာ သူမကိုလူတိုင္း
ကရပ္ၾကည့္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ မၾကာခင္မွာပဲ ေက်ာင္းမွာႏွစ္သက္စရာအေကာင္းဆံုးမိန္းမပ်ိဳးျဖစ္
လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူမကိုယ္တိုင္ စီကံုးေရးသားထားတဲ့ သီခ်င္းေတြကိုသီဆိုတဲ့အခါ၊ ပိုျပီးေတာ့မွ
လူေတြကၾကိဳက္ႏွစ္သက္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ပထမသီခ်င္းကိုဆိုတဲ့အခါ၊ၾကားရသူတိုင္း အလြန္မွပင္
သေဘာက်ၾကျပီး သူမဟာေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ခဲ့ပါေတာ့တယ္။
သူမဟာ ပိုမိုျပီးအလုပ္႐ႈပ္ေထြးလာခဲ့တဲ့အတြက္ စာသင္ခ်ိန္ေတြကိုခ်န္လွပ္ထားခဲ့ပါ
တယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္၊အတန္းတင္စာေမးပြဲကိုေတာ့အမွတ္ေကာင္းေကာင္းနဲ႔ေအာင္ျမင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ေက်ာင္းဆရာေတြကအံ့ဩလို႔၊စာမသင္ဘဲနဲ႔ေကာင္းတဲ့အမွတ္ရတာဟာ သူမရဲ႕စီမံခန္႔ခြဲပံုကိုေမးခဲ့
ၾကပါေတာ့တယ္။ သူမကေတာ့ဘာေျပာရမွန္းမသိျဖစ္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္၊သူမစိတ္ထဲမွာေတာ့
အေမရဲ႕ဆုေတာင္းေပးမႈေၾကာင့္ျဖစ္မယ္လို႔ စဥ္းစားခဲ့မိပါတယ္။
႐ြင္းဒါႏိုင္ငံျမိဳ႕ေတာ္ ကီဂါလီးမွာရွိတဲ့တကၠသိုလ္မွာသီခ်င္းဆိုေလာက၌ထူးခြ်န္ေက်ာ္
ၾကားသူျဖစ္လာေအာင္ သူမၾကိဳးစားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူမဟာအဆင့္ျမင့္တဲ့ေတးဂီတအသံသြင္းအခန္း
မွာသီခ်င္းေတြသြင္းခဲ့ျပီး၊ ညကပြဲေတြမွာသီခ်င္းဆိုျပီးကခုန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူမဟာပိုျပီးေတာ့မွသူမ
ရဲ႕အဝတ္အထည္ေတြကိုလိမ္ဆြဲျပီး၊ ဆန္႔က်င္ဘက္လိင္ကိုဆြဲေဆာင္တဲ့အဆိုေတာ္ေတြလိုပဲဝတ္
ဆင္ခဲ့ပါေတာ့တယ္။ သူမရဲ႕နား႐ြက္တစ္ခုဆီေပၚမွာ နားကပ္သံုးခုစီဝတ္ဆင္ခဲ့ျပီးႏွာေခါင္းေပၚ
မွာလည္းအလွဖုကိုဝတ္ဆင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူမရဲ႕အေရျပားေပၚမွာလည္းေဆးမွင္ေၾကာင္ထိုးခဲ့ပါ
တယ္။
အေ႐ွ႕ပိုင္း႐ြင္းဒါႏိုင္ငံမွာေနထိုင္တဲ့မိဘေတြဟာ ဝမ္းနည္းခဲ့ၾကျပီး၊အေဖကလည္းသူမကို
ပိုက္ဆံမပို႔ေတာ့ပါ။ Yvonne ဟာလံုးဝစိတ္ဓါတ္မက်ပဲ၊ကပြဲမွရတဲ့ဝင္ေငြနဲ႔မလံုေလာက္လို႔၊ျမိဳ႕မ
ေဈးထဲမွာ အထည္ေတြေရာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူမဟာ မူၾကိဳေက်ာင္းမွာလည္းေက်ာင္းဆရာမအလုပ္
ကိုလုပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
သူမဟာမူၾကိဳေက်ာင္းမွာ ျဖတ္ထားတဲ့ဂ်င္းေဘာင္းဘီတိုကိုဝတ္လာျပီး၊လက္ဝတ္ရတ
နာေတြကိုလည္းဆင္ယင္မြမ္းမံခဲ့လို႔ ကေလးေတြကသေဘာက်ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ မူၾကိဳကကေလးေတြ
ကလည္းသူတို႔မိခင္ေတြကို ေဆးမွင္ေၾကာင္ထိုးေပးဖို႔၊ႏွာေခါင္းမွာအလွဖုတတ္ဆင္ေပးဖို႔ေတာင္း
ဆိုခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ မိခင္ေတြဟာ ေက်ာင္းဆရာမအသစ္ရဲ႕ဝတ္စားဆင္ယင္မႈက ကေလးေတြကို
စိတ္ဓါတ္ထျြကေစေၾကာင္းသိရွိလာၾကျပီး၊ တိုင္တန္းဖို႔မူၾကိဳေက်ာင္းမွာစုေဝးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။
အဆက္မျပတ္တိုင္တန္းမႈေၾကာင့္Yvonne ဟာဝမ္းနည္းေၾကကြဲခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ သူမဟာ
႐ံုးပိတ္တဲ့ေန႔ေတြမွာညပိုင္းကပြဲေတြကိုဆက္ကေပမယ့္၊သူမဟာဝမ္းနည္းေၾကတံုးပါဘဲ။ သူမဟာ
ဘာလုပ္ရမွန္းမသိျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
တစ္ေန႔က်ေတာ့၊သူမအိမ္မွာထိုင္ေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္၊သတၲမေန႔ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ရဲ႕
အနားမွာအသံခ်ဲ႕စက္နဲ႔တရားေဟာေနတာကို ၾကားခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ သူမဟာအဲဒီတရားကိုမၾကားလို
တဲ့အတြက္၊ အိပ္ခန္းတံခါးကိုျပင္းထန္စြာပိတ္လိုက္ျပီး၊ သီခ်င္းကိုအသံအက်ယ္ၾကီးဖြင့္ကာနား
ေထာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ေနာက္တစ္ညမွာလည္း၊တရားေဟာဆရာကအျခားတရားေဟာခ်က္ကိုေဟာခဲ့ျပီးတ
တိယညမွာလည္းဆက္လက္ေဟာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ေနာက္ဆံုးမွာ Yvonne ဟာအ႐ံႈးေပးခဲ့ရျပီး၊သူမရဲ႕အိမ္မွာပဲတရားေဟာခ်က္ကို နား
ေထာင္ခဲ့ပါေတာ့တယ္။ တရားေဟာဆရာရဲ႕စကားလံုးေတြကသူမစိတ္ကို ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ေစခဲ့ပါတယ္။
အဲဒါနဲ႔၊သူမဟာဘုရားသြားတက္ျပီး၊တရားေဟာခ်က္ေတြကိုနားေထာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ တရားပြဲရဲ႕အဆံုး
မွာသူမဟာေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံယူခဲ့ပါတယ္။ Yvonne ဟာသူ႔ရဲ႕အသံကိုဘုရားအမႈေတာ္အတြက္ဆက္
ကပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ယေန႔၊Yvonne ဟာေက်ာင္းဆရာမျဖစ္ျပီး၊အသက္(၂၇)ႏွစ္ရွိပါျပီ။ သူမဟာဘုရားသ
ခင္ရဲ႕ဘုန္းေတာ္ကို ထင္ရွားေစဖို႔အတြက္သီခ်င္းေတြကိုစီကံုးေရးသားတဲ့အျပင္၊အဆိုေတာ္တစ္
ဦးျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္၊သူမဟာ အသင္းေတာ္ထဲမွာတစ္ဦးတည္းေသာအမ်ိဳးသမီးေခါင္းေဆာင္
ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
“ကြ်န္မရဲ႕အာေဘာ္အတိုင္း အသက္ရွင္ေလွ်ာက္လွမ္းခဲ့တဲ့ဘဝကေန၊ၾကည့္႐ႈေစာင့္
ေရွာက္ခဲ့တဲ့ဘုရားသခင္ကိုအထူးေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္။ ကိုယ္ေတာ္သာကြ်န္မကိုမကာကြယ္ဘူးဆို
ရင္၊အခုအခ်ိန္မွာေသေနေလာက္ပါျပီ”လို႔ ဝမ္းသာစြာျဖင့္ေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
သူမအေနနဲ႔၊သမၼာက်မ္းစာရဲ႕အႏွစ္သာရအားျဖင့္ သူမကိုခ်ီးေျမႇာက္တဲ့မိဘေတြအေပၚ
အထူးပဲေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္။ သူမဟာ၊သုတၲံက်မ္း ၂၂း၆၊”သူငယ္သြားရာလမ္းဝ၌ဆံုးမသြန္သင္
ေလာ့။ သို႔ျပဳလွ်င္သူသည္ အိုေသာအခါထိုလမ္းမွမလြဲ၊လိုက္သြားလိမ့္မည္”လို႔ေရးသားထားတဲ့
သမၼာတရားကိုသေဘာေပါက္နားလည္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
“ကြ်န္မရဲ႕ကေလးဘဝကေန၊ကြ်န္မအေမရဲ႕သြန္သင္ဆံုးမမႈဟာ က်မကိုျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲ
ေစခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဘုရားသခင္ကိုကြ်န္မေက်ာခိုင္းခဲ့ေပမယ့္၊ကြ်န္မအေမရဲ႕ဆံုးမစကားေတြဟာ ကြ်န္မ
ႏွလံုးသားထဲမွာေတာ့က်န္ရွိခဲ့ပါတယ္” လို႔ဂုဏ္ယူစြာျဖင့္ ေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဒီတပတ္ Yvonne ရဲ႕သက္ေသခံခ်က္ကေတာ့ဒီေလာက္ပါဘဲ။
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