The Fran Zimmerman Wenger Transcultural Nursing Scholarship Endowment Fund

Culturally appropriate healthcare was the passion and the practice of Anna Frances “Fran” Zimmerman Wenger, Professor and Director Emerita of the Goshen College Nursing Department. A founding member and past president of the Transcultural Nursing Society (TCNS), Fran brought a world of opportunity to Goshen College. Besides being a nursing professor at Goshen College for 27 years, she also spent 15 years at Emory University. In both settings she influenced countless nursing students, permeating her teaching with cultural competence.

Fran passed away in 2013 after a cancer diagnosis. The following story, written by her husband, Mario Wenger, captures the impact Fran had on her students and the work she did to cultivate cultural competence as key to providing culturally appropriate care to those in need:

Fran was already in hospice care early in 2013, and while I was visiting her one morning, a visitor came, introduced herself as a regional representative of hospice care, and without further ado, she sat down, pulled out a clipboard and asked, “Well, who is this lady we have here?”

 

A reasonable opener, but before I could fashion my answer, the attending nurse who was taking Fran’s vitals turned and said, “You don’t know who this is? This is a very important person!”

 

Subhekchya (also known as “Subu”) soon gave an eloquent description of my wife and what she meant in her own training as an international student nurse. Subu graduated from Goshen College with a nursing degree after Fran’s retirement and then went on to earn a master of science in nursing degree, also from Goshen College. Now, there are many alumni of Goshen College on staff where Subu worked at Greencroft Healthcare near the college, but she was an exception. She came to Goshen, Indiana, from Kathmandu, Nepal.

 

Subu first met Fran at a workshop for student nurses organized by Fran and featuring Fran’s colleague, Dr. Minette Coetzee, Director of Pediatric HIV-AIDS care at the University of Cape Town, Republic of South Africa. On a teaching and learning tour of our country, Dr. Coetzee personified her country’s commitment to the smallest of the marginalized. Fran’s friendship with Dr. Coetzee had begun years before in relation to her work with Faith and Healing Consortium colleagues in Cape Town, part of an affiliation of healthcare workers, theologians and ethicists, which extended as far as Berkeley, California.

 

Subu went on to relate how Fran had befriended her at that time and helped her make the difficult transition in culture, giving her a new appreciation of “culturally competent” healthcare. Some twenty years earlier, when Fran served as director of the Goshen College Nursing Department, she hired a Japanese American-born missionary nurse who had been working in Nepal, in part to expand diversity in the faculty of Goshen College. When Subu came as a student to Goshen College, Fran learned that it was Subu’s uncle in Kathmandu who had helped Hisa Asaoka, the Japanese American Goshen College nursing instructor, to learn her first works of Nepali and adjust to life there, where she went on to serve the people of Nepal for many years.

Then Subu spoke in reverent tones of Fran’s professional leadership in the Transcultural Nursing Society (TCNS), serving as its president and organizing, supporting and encouraging other educators and researchers with publication in the Society’s Journal and with its select Scholars Group. She knew that Fran, along with her husband, Mario, had spent many summers in Ethiopia with the Carter Center’s Ethiopian Public Health Initiative based in Emory University in Atlanta.

 

I can only wish that other members of the TCNS, who knew and appreciated Fran for her spirit and friendship, in addition to her professional achievements, had been there with me that morning at the bedside of a remarkable woman in her last days.

 

“Well done, good and faithful servant.” (Matthew 25:23)