Elfrieda Klassen Dyck Compassionate Nursing Scholarship

Elfrieda embodied compassion — everybody with whom she interacted felt marked by her caring and gentleness. She listened actively and remembered people’s names, relationships and problems. When she asked “How are you?” it was always clear that this was no trite social formula.  Her quiet manner of conveying interest and support was in itself therapeutic to all those who came to her for help. In this way she never left the nursing role.

She was the youngest of 14 children, born March 10, 1917 in Donskaja, Russia. In 1925 she emigrated with her family to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her father had died in Russia, and in her mother’s last two years her mother was bedridden with congestive heart failure.  Young Elfrieda devotedly cared for her, and this was her first foray into nursing.

She trained at St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg and received her RN degree in 1939.  She then nursed in Steinbach, Manitoba, where one cold winter’s night she delivered a baby in the back seat of a car in front of the hospital, as there was no one else on duty and the woman couldn’t be moved.  She employed “critical thinking” strategies long before the concept was in vogue!

In I942 she volunteered with the Mennonite Central Committee in war-torn England.  She nursed in a home for babies in Wales and in a home for convalescent boys near Manchester, where she married Peter J. Dyck.  After the war they distributed relief supplies in Holland, then worked with Mennonite refugees from the USSR in Germany and escorted more than 5,500 refugees in four transports to South America.  On two of these ships she was the sole escort serving in the multiple roles of organizer and authority and nurse.  On one of the voyages she assisted five women in giving birth and supported five elderly people in their deaths, so the ship arrived at port with the same number of passengers as it had on departure.  On a trip by Peter to Paraguay 60 years later, many of those refugees recounted fondly the way she had lifted their spirits with a smile and a kind word or a hand on their shoulder.

In 1949 both Elfrieda and Peter studied at Goshen College.  From 1950-57 she mothered her two daughters and supported Peter’s pastoring in Moundridge, Kansas. Then they returned to work for MCC in Europe, and one of her many tasks was to assemble relief parcels on behalf of North American Mennonites for their relatives in the USSR.  Ten years later the Dycks moved to Akron, Pennsylvania where Elfrieda worked as a geriatric nurse at Fairmount Nursing Home and visited sick members of the Akron Mennonite Church. Her attention was practical and helpful, often accompanied by her cookies or peppernuts. She laughed easily and had a lively sense of humor, bringing smiles to the people she served.

On October 18, 1974 at the 29th convocation of the University of Waterloo, the Senate and Board of Governors of Conrad Grebel College gave a banquet to honor her life of service. The citation says in part:

    “You provided a model for women

      who seek major responsibilities in the twentieth century.

      In a world eroding from lack of soul

      you have made service luminous and attractive.

      Christian pilgrim,

      Canadian nurse,

      twentieth century woman,

      healer of tragic divisions and

      Good Samaritan . . .

      For this life we honour you

      at Conrad Grebel College tonight.”

Education was always highly valued by Elfrieda and Peter, with a particular focus on the unique contribution of Mennonite academic institutions.  With their assistance their children, Ruth and Rebecca, as well as four grandchildren, graduated from Goshen College.  The fifth grandchild chose a Canadian university and the education funds thus released became the seed of this scholarship.  

Elfrieda shunned public speaking and rhetoric, focusing instead on action.  Her life exemplified skilled nursing, warm hospitality, active compassion, and a love of family and God.  When she died on August 20, 2004 at age 87, she donated her body to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the last service that she could perform for mankind.