“Can you drive my nephew’s wife back to her house?” Ong asked with a hopeful look in his eye.
I was very busy and didn’t feel like interrupting my schedule to transport a sick person. “Probably just someone wanting a free ride back home,” I thought.

“I am very busy today, but maybe tonight at 6:30 I could do it,” I said, silently hoping they wouldn’t want to wait that long. “And you will have to pay for the gas,” I added.

“Okay,” he said. “We will wait.”

At 6:30, Ong, Caleb and I headed to the local hospital. The patient, a young lady, was completely unconscious, as if in a deep sleep, so we carried her to the truck. Twenty minutes later, we were driving through narrow back alleys of a large Muslim village. My headlights shone on men and boys curiously watching as they leaned over the rail of the high-stilted mosque. At the house, a man carried the patient up the steep steps, and Ong beckoned us to follow. The young woman was laid in the middle of the floor as people gathered around her—women on one side, and men on the other.

An older woman, perhaps the young lady’s mother, started pressing sections of a mandarin orange through her lips. Oddly enough, she chewed and swallowed them easily.

Soon, other strange things began to happen. The young lady began to giggle spontaneously and grin as if someone had told a joke. “An ahplea has entered her,” someone said. “Satan, Iblis, a jinn,” someone else said from across the room.
Ong, who practices traditional healing, began blowing puffs of air over her body and mixing up potions to pour over her head. He sat her up on a rock and slapped her when she giggled—anything to drive the demon away.

The hair on the back on my neck began to stand on end. I turned Caleb to face me, grabbed his hands and prayed that Jesus would be in our midst to protect us and free the lady from the demonic influence.

After Ong’s unsuccessful attempts, he motioned for us that it was time to go home. We slipped down the stairs, into the truck and back to our village.

At home, Molly and I prayed for the lady that Jesus would heal her. Several days later, Ong came over to visit. I asked him how the young lady was doing.

“She is well now,” he said.

“Does this happen a lot?” I asked.

“Yes. In that same village, there were two more people with the same problem,” he said.

“Why does this happen?” I asked.

“When people go into the forests, if they are scared, an ahplea can enter them. But if they aren’t scared, the alphlea cannot enter them,” he said.

Scared or not, many people here are held in Satan’s grasp. Please pray that God will rescue these souls.

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