This past Friday we had the opportunity to help out with the first ever health clinic hosted by the International Healing Ministries church in out village. Our host said when she found out we had a nurse on our team, she wanted to use that gifting to serve the community. We opened the doors around 10am and we helped measure people’s height, weight and BMI, took their blood pressure, and then a nurse from the church and our nurse (aka Andrew Galea) would give health recommendations based on the data, sometimes testing blood sugar levels if they felt like someone was at risk. We also had a team of people praying over patients as they waited to speak to the doctors.
I was a part of the prayer squad for this ministry the first day, and we got to pray over all sorts of things. Some people would come over and say they had headaches or stomach pains, some people would say they had nothing wrong and would just ask for prayer for their families and their studies, and some people said their house has been tourmented by demons and they needed prayers of deliverance for their household.
Every single person we prayed for was so appreciative of our prayers. They were so happy to feel seen and known, and that we were willing to pray for anything and everything. We didn’t see any miraculous healings persay, but we saw the freedom and the joy the Lord brought them through our prayers.
At the end of the clinic Friday, we had found out that the nurses had recommended a few people go to the hospital because they were at high risk of having heart attacks or strokes, and even though we felt like we weren’t doing much since we couldn’t give out medicine or provide actual healthcare, we were still able to save those people‘s lives by having the clinic.
There were about 100 people at the first clinic, and our host said the people appreciated it so much that she wanted to hos a second one in a village farther away and we could help out again. This time, there were almost 300 people and many of them had never seen World Racers before, much less white people. However, it was an honor to get to serve these people. There were a few more patients that were sent to the hospital just in the nick of time, and some with even more serious symptoms.
At first, I was helping to take blood pressure and calculate BMI’s, but at the end of the day I joined the prayer squad, because everyone wanted prayer. We got to pray over mostly the same things, but we had a few more exciting stories this time. The weekend before we got to pray for deliverances for people’s families, but we didn’t actually see any demons or possessions. But this past Friday, we did. It was pretty minor, but a woman told us her daughter was being oppressed by a demon, and it was visible. She wasn’t doing anything crazy, but she would not let us touch her and was scared when we got close to her. At first we thought maybe it was because she’d never seen white people, but the mom confirmed that that was not what it was, and she was like that a lot with most people. So we prayed over her and that whatever Spirit would leave in the name of Jesus, and after we prayed, her demeanor was completely different. Her eyes were dull and glazed over before, and she was extremly jittery, but after we prayed for her, she actually waved at us and gave us high-fives. I had never seen anything like that before, and apparently that was an easy Spirit to rebuke, but it was still cool to get to excersize the authority we have over the forces of this world in the name of Jesus.
Then later, we spoke to a woman and she said she wanted us to pray for her because she had had a vision that white people were going to come to her village and that when they prayed for her in the vision, her sister returned home. I didn‘t get to pray over her, but my teammates did, and it was amazing to see the way God used our presence there to pray for this woman and her sister.
This health clinic is just one of the amazing testimonies our team has from our time here in Rwanda. God truly placed us here for a reason. He used our gifting to bless this community in so many different ways, and I and so thankful to our team and our host to being so obedient to what the Lord has placed on their hearts.
