Helen Erickson, missionary fluent in Swahili

As a Lutheran educator, she spent decades in Tanzania, teaching nursing and translating the Bible.

By Patrick Kennedy, Star Tribune

Last update: May 13, 2007 - 8:52 PM

Armed with a gift for languages and a passion for teaching, Helen Erickson devoted her life to mission work in Tanzania.

She was inspired by early missionaries who came to speak to her hometown church in Forest Lake and followed in their footsteps during a career that spanned five decades. Erickson died on May 9 at age 88.

She studied nursing at the Swedish Hospital in Minneapolis, where she graduated in 1940. With an eye toward mission work, she also attended the Lutheran Bible Institute and graduated in 1944.

She was called as a missionary to Tanzania in 1944 by the Lutheran church.

She was in Tanzania off and on from 1944 to 1983. During her early years there, she worked as a nurse at Iambi Hospital and later at a hospital for leprosy patients. After a four-year stay in Tanzania, she returned to Minnesota to study, receiving a degree in nursing education from the University of Minnesota in 1951.

She returned to Tanzania and opened the Kiombi Nurses Training Center at the Kiombi Hospital.

Her first nursing class graduated in 1956. The students she taught, both men and women, become nurses who would work in local hospitals, dispensaries and villages.

"The effect she had on her Tanzanian students was really good. It [the nursing training] was a real boon for them. It helped them escape a subsistence lifestyle," said Herbert Monson of Waconia, who served as a missionary in Tanzania from 1953 to 1963.

For the nursing school, she wrote a syllabus in the Swahili language and later developed a keen interest in one of the local tribal languages, Ilyamba. On a home leave in the late 1960s to care for her ailing parents, she also earned a master's degree in linguistics and minors in anthropology and foreign language teaching from the University of Minnesota.

In 1970, she returned to Tanzania and opened a language school for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania. During the next 13 years, she would teach 22 courses and 500 students. She also translated New and Old Testament passages and church literature into Swahili and other local languages.

Martha Fosse of Edina, a nurse and missionary in Tanzania, met Erickson there. After Erickson retired in 1983, the two became housemates for the next 20 years. Until a few weeks ago, Fosse said, Erickson would sing in Swahili. "When she was in both assisted living and nursing homes she had caregivers from Kenya who marveled at her language skills," Fosse said.

Erickson is survived by nephews and nieces. Services will be held at 11 a.m. today at St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Bloomington, with visitation one hour before services.

Patrick Kennedy • 612-673-7926 • pkennedy@startribune.com

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