IVORY COAST - 1945-1997

Re-reading my sister Helen Krueger’s book about her 52 years in the Ivory Coast, it seems to get more interesting each I time I open it. Through the 85 pages of her book “Chosen to Go” one can feel we’ve been there and walked with her. With more book requests she had an additional 100 copies printed. She sells these reprints at cost which is ten dollars plus postage. She took a tumble when using her walker, is in good spirits, and recovering without complaint from a broken femur. Her phone number is: 1-778-470-4450, or e-mail elhoward@ telus.net.

Helen suggests the people she worked with in the outback of the Ivory Coast gave her tips for everyday living that we all, even now, might benefit from, especially with our increasing needs for energy, air and water. She never asks for money and feels that living honestly and “growing in grace” as scriptures advise us, prayers for necessities are answered. She now lives in the Overlander Care Home in Kamloops with four room mates, knows their names, and many others in the building and adds, “I enjoy them all.”

Before she went to Ivory Coast in 1945 she took a nursing course in Toronto that included basic dental needs. She realized the importance of education and with only a small pension helped Mme.Yvonne Dilou’s two sons complete their university degrees. Mme. Dilou (whose husband was killed in a motor bike accident) had taken care of Helen when she broke her hip in 1997. When able to travel Helen returned to Canada for retirement.

Later when she broke her arm, I went to Kamloops for three weeks to help out and she shared her mail in the evenings. She usually sent “round robin letters” to family and friends. To save paper she might append a note “This letter goes to ‘so and so’ next.” The same pen then went to work making out two cheques for well over two thousand dollars each for two nieces for university tuition when they had expressed desires to become doctors. She handed them to me to check to be sure she had made them out right. One of her letters included a small cheque from friends in our home town with a note that read, “Buy something for your self!” Most of her own clothing always waited hopefully on hangers at the Thrift Store. My younger sister and her husband drive 35 kilometers three times a week to visit her and bring her mail that comes from the Ivory Coast. He has equipped his computer keyboard to include the circumflex letters required for French. After returning home, he types her answers on his keyboard and lets Cyberspace take them the Ivory Coast.