by Hilda Bih Muluh as told on the Story Partners Podcast
I was born healthy, like most children.
And around the age of four or five, I started noticing that everything was not okay in the way I walked and the way I used my hands.
And ever since then, my body has been growing weaker and weaker.
The Early Signs
My name is Hilda Bih Muluh. I was born in Bamenda, a little town in Cameroon on the west central coast of Africa. My great-grandma was very loving, but also a strong, strict disciplinarian. I remember when I started struggling to walk as a four or five-year-old. She was one of the first people who noticed something was wrong. At the time, she thought it was just a childhood prank, maybe I was trying to imitate someone I had seen. She would try to stop me, giving me a little slap and saying, ‘Walk rightly.’ She would show me how to put my foot down, not knowing that this was something serious.
I tried to avoid her so I wouldn’t be scolded. If I saw her coming, I would just sit down, because I was trying to walk right to the best of my ability. I would still try to play and run with the other kids, but I fell a lot. As a child, I thought it was just something that would go away after a while.
“Ben-Ben-Foot”
By the time I was five or six and starting school, I became more conscious of my walk because other kids pointed it out. There are always mean kids. In my country, they use an expression in Pidgin English: ‘ben-ben-foot.’ It’s a derogatory term for someone with a disability. They used names to make sure I knew I was not like them.
We played outdoors a lot, and if they were going on a ‘dangerous adventure,’ they would say, ‘Don’t come. This requires running and you may not be able to run, so just stay home.’ I started feeling a sense of seclusion and being left behind. I became afraid of stepping out and being called names. I retreated into my own little shell.
I also had dreams of dark spirits attacking me. I would scream so hard in my sleep that my family could hear me in real life. I’d wake up to find everyone sitting there looking at me, asking what was going on.
The Witch Doctor
As time went on, my family realized I wasn’t getting better. My feet started curving in like clubfoot, and I had to start wearing braces. My fingers were also curling in; I couldn’t hold things properly and needed painful braces for my hands, too. My mom was in charge of putting them on. I would spend all day dreading the evening. When she called me to put them on, I would just start crying because I was afraid of the pain and knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
We went to church a lot, but my faith then was just the faith of my mother and family. I never gave up on getting better. Every time we went to a hospital, I’d tell people, ‘Wait, I’m going to come back better this time,’ but it never worked. My body was falling apart.
In Cameroon, the witch doctor is often the first stop for illness, especially due to poverty or lack of education. I believed that since my parents and grandparents believed in it, it would make me better. I stayed at one witch doctor’s place for half a year. His practice involved making incisions on my body—my forehead, face, shoulders, chest, back, and ankles. He always made three cuts with a razor. I would see the blood oozing out, and he would put a potion in the wounds. This was repeated every three days.
I even missed an entire year of school living in a medicine man’s house. Some witch doctors called me ‘anokbanji’—a child who exists in both the human and spirit worlds. They claimed I was a spirit sent to cause havoc, and they had to ‘cleanse’ me. They would slaughter chickens or perform rituals over my head. In some cases, children accused of being anokbanji are abandoned by a river so they can ‘go back’ to the spirit world. By some divine providential hand, they didn’t take me that far. The Lord spared me from that darkness.
The War Zone
I read Bible stories and knew God had the power to make the lame walk. I added my faith to my family’s faith and prayed for healing, but nothing happened. I wondered if the witch doctors were right; maybe I was cursed. I’d look at hundreds of people in church and ask, ‘Why me, God? Am I the most sinful? Why would You curse me?’
Because I couldn’t walk properly, my parents often had to carry me to school on their backs. I was angry at the Lord for being carried like a baby. During this time, my hometown was the epicenter of political violence. When military attacks or skirmishes happened, the town would shut down. They called it a ‘ghost town.’
One afternoon while I was in class, we heard noises. Within minutes, students were jumping through windows to run home. The campus emptied, and my family was on the other side of town. I sat there in the classroom alone, not knowing if help would come. I picked up a bamboo cane and started walking slowly. The road that usually had hundreds of students was empty. I prayed, ‘God, if You are there, I need Your help.’
After 30 minutes, I saw a shadow on the horizon. I was scared—you never knew if it was a soldier or someone dangerous. But it was a man from a nearby building site. He had seen my brother carrying me many times before and had come back to check on me because he realized I was alone. He brought me to a small room my parents rented near the school. I stayed there alone for a week while the town was unsafe. I don’t even remember how I survived. Eventually, my uncle came and carried me home on his back through the war zone, past charred vehicles and blocked paths.
The Wheelchair
I thought I was a good person. I was kind, polite, and respectful. I felt God owed me a healthy body. I became bitter. If everyone else fails me, not You, God. Why would You take away my health?
To me, sitting in a wheelchair meant I would never get better. I had such resistance to it. I felt I would rather die than be in a wheelchair.
My family was loving and accepting, but having a child with a disability was a massive challenge for them. I see now the strain it put on us. We were of modest financial means, and my condition often took my parents away from the work that fed my eight siblings.
For most of the week, my father would stay back to take me to school, only working on the weekends. This made things easier for my brothers, who otherwise had to carry me on their backs. However, when I was about 14, my father was in a serious car accident. His life was spared, but he almost lost his left leg and ended up on crutches.
Around this time, I was introduced to ‘tricycle life.’ My father and I became a curious pair—him on crutches, me on a hand-cranked tricycle. But the tricycle required arm strength I didn’t have. It felt like it was just taking me to a harder place. If a building was inaccessible, I couldn’t go in. My body was weakening, and I honestly felt I wouldn’t live much longer.
Rehearsing My Funeral
I used to watch reruns of The 700 Club, searching for testimonies of healing. When I wasn’t healed, I convinced myself God didn’t love me. I felt like the worst sufferer in the world. I thought, ‘What value do I have if I can’t use my arms or legs? I can’t get a job, I can’t get married—I’m just a burden.’
I became rebellious. I would lie in bed and rehearse my own funeral, imagining people crying, but then eventually moving on so I would no longer be a weight on their shoulders. I decided to kill myself. I couldn’t hold a knife, so I got a bottle of strong bleach used in Cameroon. I drank it one night, expecting they would find my body the next morning.
But I woke up. Nothing happened. The Lord was thinking of ways to save me while I was thinking of ways to die.
Stories of Triumph
The shift in my heart began with a book called “My Son Johnny“, written by the parents of a child with severe disabilities. They were so grateful for his life, seeing him as a godsend even after he passed away. I realized I could still speak, write, and go to school, yet I was acting as if God hated me. It began to thaw my icy, bitter heart.
Then I found Joni Eareckson Tada’s story. She was paralyzed from the neck down after a diving accident. Reading her story, I literally had to sit up. I had been comparing myself to healthy people, but comparing myself to Joni made me realize how much I could still do that I wasn’t grateful for. She was praising God in a much weaker body.
The Lord used her book to expose my sinfulness and ingratitude. For years, my life had been colored by a ‘How dare You, God’ attitude. Seeing people with more severe disabilities trust Him made me reconsider everything. I realized His love isn’t defined by my physical ability. I repented of my bitterness and asked the Lord into my heart. I decided that even if my body continued to fail, God could be glorified in it.
A Changed Perspective
In my final year of high school, I accepted that I might not be healed, but I wanted to know what was happening to me. I once sneaked into the records room of a rehab center run by Franciscan nuns. I found my green paper file, but the area for ‘diagnosis’ was blank. Even after all that trouble, I had no answer.
Eventually, the internet gave me access to other people’s stories. I began to suspect I had muscular dystrophy. I also kept reading about Joni Eareckson Tada. Seeing her travel the world and live an adventurous life in a wheelchair changed my perspective. I realized being in a chair could actually be fun.
When I finally got a manual wheelchair, it was a relief because it was easier to transport. And when I got a power chair? That was true freedom. For the first time since I was four years old, I could move on my own. I wanted to go out every day; there was too much to see and too many people to meet.
One Day I’ll Be Dancing
Years later, I attended a conference in America where they offered genetic testing. I finally got my answer: Limb-girdle muscular dystrophy.
Today, I am 45. I have lost almost all use of my arms and legs. It is a debilitating, progressive disease with no cure. People ask what I will do in ten or twenty years. I look back at how God has been faithful and remember His promise in Isaiah: ‘Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you.’ The real miracle isn’t physical healing—it’s that my heart of stone, which used to accuse God, now rests in His love. People tell me I am a joyous person now, but it wasn’t always that way. Joy is a fruit of the Spirit that He produces even in painful situations. He doesn’t deny our pain, but He says, ‘Bring it to me.’
I’ve learned that the only thing you can’t lose in this world is Jesus. If I had health but didn’t have Christ, it wouldn’t mean a thing. He is the Giver who wants to be the real gift. I am on an adventure with Him now, and I’m excited for the next chapter. I love that He has already told us the end of the story: one day, I will be out of this wheelchair, dancing with Jesus. Until then, I can look back at the very thing I vowed never to accept and say, ‘Thank You, Lord, for the wheelchair.’
