The DMI blog aims to let people know about the deaf kids, teachers, pastors, schools and churches that DMI supports in developing countries, and encourage support for them by telling their amazing stories. Please share this blog with your friends.
“Dead for three days and then came back to life,” I was told. What? They weren’t talking about Jesus, or Lazarus or Jairus’ daughter. They were talking about a guy called Dennis. Really? Do these things really happen? Still happen? I had to find out for myself, and in doing so I met a man whose life story is so much more than merely coming back from the dead.
When I first see Dennis he is hunched, he has a withered arm, his head sits to one side, and he draws near with an awkward limp, but all I see is his smile. He has the biggest African smile and he breaks into a delightful cackle as our phones connect.
Dennis Dag-kene was born in Lira, Uganda in 1983. The second of five siblings, he was a strong and healthy boy. His father died when he was still a child. With no income for the family, Dennis and his siblings were unable to go to school, and jobs were hard to come by. With few options available to him, at the age of ten, Dennis became a child soldier. He completed his military training but never went to war because further tragedy awaited him.
Dennis caught cerebral malaria.
Over half a million people are afflicted with malaria every year, most of them children in sub-Saharan Africa. Cerebral malaria is the most severe form of the disease typically characterised by coma, a high mortality rate and severe neurological injury to survivors. Dennis was twelve when he was taken to hospital, fell into a coma, and was declared dead.
Three days later his coffin was lowered into the grave. Attendants began to shovel soil onto the simple wooden casket as the priest prayed for Dennis’ soul and for those who remained in his family. Just then, mourners heard his body move and saw the lid of the coffin edge open. Absolutely stunned, they lifted the coffin back out of its pit, opened it and found that the young boy had come back to life.
Dennis remembers none of this. He didn’t spring out of his coffin like a jack-in-the-box. He was unconscious the whole time. All he remembers was waking up back in the hospital, alive but a very different boy from the one who had first arrived there.
Few though they are, we tend to think of resurrection stories as joy-filled and jubilant happenings, preferably to the soundtrack of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. But Dennis awoke lonely, confused and with a body gnarled by cerebral palsy. He was deaf, could barely speak, was paralysed in his right arm, and crippled. Where is the jubilation in that? What is the point of raising someone back to life like that?
Dennis was inconsolable.
Looking for a more positive direction, I ask him how he came to know Neville. What’s the connection there? He breaks into a huge smile again, laughs and begins to shake his head as if to say, “You’re never going to believe it!” I can tell there is a lot more to come in this interview.
Indeed, there is. Visions, international travel, scholastic achievement and the wise discernment of a humble Melburnian called Neville feature large in this man’s life. This is a story to be told and re-told. I’ll share more of Dennis’ life in the next blog.
If you would like to know how you can support Dennis, any of the kids or teachers, or help meet any of DMI’s needs, please click on the donate button on the top right of the page, or mail to info@deafmin.org
Andrew, I really like the angle you have on Dennis’ resurrection in this blog. It is a miracle, and at the same time it is a down to earth description, where you write realistically about sufferings as a continuous reality in Dennis’ life. Thanks.