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While graduates will soon be looking for work and dreaming of the life that lies before them, 98-year-old Elsie Wenger of Boonville remembers the time that followed her 1936 graduation from Lutheran Hospital Nursing School in St. Louis as a period in which she worked with her husband in southern China.
Their mission involved helping the Chinese people while being faced with constant air raids and the war that Japan had declared on the country.
Wenger’s daughters, Kathleen Lenz and Geraldine Wegener, remember their mother telling them stories of how she became a missionary’s wife.
In September 1939, Wenger was married, and she was soon off to a war zone in southern China to accompany her husband with his work. Wenger was able to travel with her husband because of the nursing services she could provide.
Wenger later learned Chinese and began teaching English to Chinese school children. Wenger’s daughter said that they graduated several classes in those early years.
While graduates will soon be looking for work and dreaming of the life that lies before them, 98-year-old Elsie Wenger of Boonville remembers the time that followed her 1936 graduation from Lutheran Hospital Nursing School in St. Louis as a period in which she worked with her husband in southern China.
Their mission involved helping the Chinese people while being faced with constant air raids and the war that Japan had declared on the country.
Wenger’s daughters, Kathleen Lenz and Geraldine Wegener, remember their mother telling them stories of how she became a missionary’s wife.
In September 1939, Wenger was married, and she was soon off to a war zone in southern China to accompany her husband with his work. Wenger was able to travel with her husband because of the nursing services she could provide.
Wenger later learned Chinese and began teaching English to Chinese school children. Wenger’s daughter said that they graduated several classes in those early years.
