Dr. Kissi Examines Every Missionary Serving In Ghana

Every other Saturday, Dr. Emmanuel A. Kissi, a true LDS Pioneer in Ghana, comes to the MTC to perform a medical check-up for every missionary serving in Ghana.  This is a requirement of the government, that missionaries are medically certified in order for them to renew their visas.  Here is a little bit about Dr. Kissi as well as a few photos of some of the missionaries he tested today.

Dr.Kissi was born in Abomosu, Ghana. He studied medicine in England. In 1979, while completing training in surgery in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, he joined the LDS Church.

After his return to Ghana, Kissi and his wife Elizabeth, who is a nurse, established a medical clinic in Accra which they named Deseret Hospital. The hospital at times has been aided by groups of LDS Church members from the United States. He has also been involved with trying to coordinate humanitarian medical care by other doctors in Ghana. Kissi was among those featured in the film Lives of Service about Latter-day Saints of African descent.

Initially after his return to Ghana, Kissi was a professor at Legon University medical school and was working as a general surgeon at Korle Bu Hospital.The first Latter-day Saint he met in Ghana was Priscilla Sampson-Davis who was reading the Doctrine and Covenants while waiting for treatment at the hospital.

By 1982, Kissi was serving the LDS Church as a district president in Ghana. He had also been a branch president,and in the late 1980s he was a counselor in the presidency of the Ghana Accra Mission. Then in June 1989, the government of Ghana suspended all meetings of the LDS Church and expelled all foreign church representatives. Kissi was designated as the official head of the church in Ghana, a position he held until "The Freeze" was over in November 1990. At the same time, from 1989 to 1991, he was president of the Ghana Accra Mission.

After this Kissi served the church as a Regional Representative of the Twelve, then as a counselor in the mission presidency. Kissi was serving as patriarch of the Accra Ghana Lartebiokorshie Stake^[ before being called as an area seventy from 2002 to 2007.