“N’kpa, j’ai un problème. Mon mari est à l’hôpital et mon argent est fini.” (“N’kpa, I have a problem. My husband is at the hospital and my money has run out.”)

Clementine told me this just a few days ago. The price of hospital bills, medicine, treatments, and lab work is a common problem here. Every week, it seems like someone we know comes asking for help with medical bills. Almost all are church members. The problem is that when people go to the hospital it is usually serious. Last week, a lady who has had pneumonia for the past five years finally had had enough pain that she came to Uli to ask if she could help her get some x-rays and purchase the medicine the doctor had prescribed. Uli has been helping the woman, and she is faithfully paying back what she borrows even though she is extremely poor and it might take her more then a year to pay it back.

A family from our church in Boukoumbé, a village about 30 miles from here, came into town to visit the hospital because their son was quite sick with anemia. The hospital had done some lab tests but had lost the results, so they were treating the child for everything they could think of—malaria, dysentery, internal infection, and anemia. He wasn’t doing better after three days, so I told them to meet me at another hospital the next morning where I know the doctors, and we would see if we could do another lab test.

The next morning, praise God, the boy was quite alert and almost normal. I talked to the doctors and they said it had taken several days for the blood transfusions to begin to work. I gave the family advice on how to make sure the boy gets enough iron using natural foods, such as the leaf powder of the Moringa tree.

We can’t help everyone, and we generally stick to people we know because so many people are just out to leech money. But God has called Christians to help their brothers and sisters in need. We are one body in Christ, and when we neglect a brother or sister in Christ, we are neglecting a part of our own body. You can never outgive the God of the universe!

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