A Seventh-day Adventist radio station in Peru has played what physician Daniel Quispe Mamani called a pivotal role in recovering from a COVID-19 infection that placed him on a mechanical ventilator for 15 days.
Mamani, a physician in the southern Peruvian city of Juliaca, was summoned to Lima, the South American nation’s capital, to help care for patients of the Mobile Emergency Care Service, whose Spanish-language initials are SAMU. During his work on a SAMU ambulance, Mamani was infected with the novel coronavirus.
What came next was harrowing: 15 days of mechanical ventilation, a process that saved his life but which also left him weak, demoralized, and in need of specialized care. Following the emergency treatment, Mamani was bedridden at the Edgardo Rebalgiati National Hospital. There, he was about to write an important chapter in his life.
“I was depressed, I felt very sad. In that moment, they brought me a cell phone and a Bible that my brother had sent me,” Mamani recalled. “It filled me with emotion, and I went to the Facebook page of Radio Nuevo Tiempo Peru in search of peace,” he added. The physician began to follow the programs and each broadcast became a balm for his emotionally wounded heart.
“It was a very difficult moment and, thanks to God who worked through the radio, I was able to find peace, I was able to find hope, which was what I was looking for the most,” he said. “When I needed words of encouragement, Radio Nuevo Tiempo was there. I know that, in those moments, God held me in his arms and, if I ever forgot, the station reminded me,” Mamani added.
Today, physician Mamani is no longer hospitalized and is receiving rehabilitation therapies leading towards his full recovery. Every day he expresses gratitude to God for the new opportunity to live: “I am a doctor and I know all the protocols and processes, and if I am sure of anything, [my deliverance] is not a coincidence. It was God. Thank you, Radio Novo Tiempo!”
For the doctor Daniel Quispe Mamani, there is no greater gratitude than to become an Angel of Hope and to help New Time continue to bring peace amid so much pain. "I want to be an Angel of Hope so that Nuevo Tiempo continues to help more people, just as it helped me," he concludes.
This article was originally published on the South American Division’s Spanish site