KALONA

Elizabeth “Betty” Barnett enjoys life at Pleasantview, surrounded by fellow residents who have become her friends in the last few years since moving here. Many of them are Mennonites, a fact that has made her somewhat shy about disclosing her past as a missionary.

A Baptist missionary.

But that beautiful chapter in her young life – she is now in her 90’s – had been a subject of national interest in the 1950’s. In the summer of 1954, they appeared on national television on the Arlene Francis Home Show. Howard Whitman, an author, journalist, and syndicated TV and radio commentator, wrote a Redbook magazine feature about Barnett and her husband, Bob, published in December that year. They were also the subject of a chapter in Whitman’s book, “Success is Within You,” published in 1962.

“We were heroes in Marshalltown, Iowa,” Barnett says, as a result of her and Bob’s missionary work.

The pair was hand-picked to join a group of 110 missionaries sent to 27 tension spots – places including India, Africa, Malaya (Malaysia and Singapore), Thailand, and Burma (Myanmar) -- where “agents of communism have been working overtime to sell a Godless doctrine,” as Whitman put it.

Each of the missionaries were chosen because they had a special skill that could help people in the country they were destined for, and because they exhibited emotional balance as well as deep faith, love, and courage. Their purpose was to counteract communism -- and anti-American sentiment – with “the simple evidence of a Christian life.”

Barnett grew up knowing she wanted to be a missionary.

“I went to church camp every summer and I met missionaries,” she says. “I thought, Well, I would like to do that. My mother wanted to be a missionary in China, and my uncle wanted to be a missionary in Japan, so I have a background of that.”

Barnett met Bob while they were both attending Coe College. She majored in philosophy and religion, and he in psychology. They fell in love, but there was a little problem: “He was not a churchgoer.”

“I said, ‘I want a husband who goes to church,’” Barnett says, “So he said, ‘OK.’”

The couple married in 1950 and moved to Marshalltown, where Bob became an ice-cream salesman and Barnett gave up the missionary idea. “I thought, well, I’ll be a wife,” she says.

They joined the First Baptist Church, where one night they listened to a missionary talk about the Congo, the great needs of the people there, and the need for more missionaries. Bob became interested, and “he knew I majored in religion, so he knew it was my dream,” Barnett says.

Bob gave it a lot of thought, and “When finally I was sure, I came home at the end of the day,” he told Whitman. “Betty was making supper in our two-room apartment. I walked in and said, ‘How would you like to go to Africa?’”

“Betty neither dropped her ladle on the floor nor the saltceller in the soup,” Whitman wrote in Redbook, “She simply turned around and said, ‘Wonderful!’”

Becoming a missionary is not a quick, simple process: it requires years of dedication and education. In 1951, Bob enrolled at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Chicago; it took him three years to earn his Bachelor of Divinity degree. By the time he was ordained to the ministry, they had a baby daughter, Debbie.

Shortly after they were chosen as two of the 110 missionaries who would push back against communism by modeling a Christian way of life. They would be going to the Belgian Congo, but first they had to study languages in Hartford, Connecticut, and then in Brussels, Belgium.

“We had to go to Brussels, Belgium for a year because the Congo was a Belgian colony,” Barnett explains. “That was a good experience. We visited different countries, Paris and so forth.”

While Bob took courses with a Belgian professor, Barnett stayed home with their two-year-old and learned to speak French with a tutor. She had studied the language in college, but could only read and write it, not speak.

When it was time to depart for Sona Bata in the Congo, they boarded a ship and embarked on a 17-day journey. Once they arrived at the port, it was another 300 miles by train before they would arrive at their new home, which was made of Adobe brick.

“A missionary had made it before we came there, and the doors were short. My husband was tall. He had to duck,” Barnett recalls with a chuckle.

Whitman, the journalist who wrote about them, couldn’t quite figure the Barnetts out. His book, about where and how to find “true” success, includes a chapter on the couple from Cedar Rapids, in which he marvels at the 20-something “brown-eyed, typically American girl” and “good-looking, blond” boy who, instead of driving an Olds and seeking a suburban ranch home, want to be missionaries.

“Just what were they seeking? What rewards would they find in this strange kind of life? Could this career, which seemed to set out in the very opposite direction from ‘success’ as we know it, actually arrive there? Money-wise these youngsters were pitifully poor – but were they actually rich?” he asked.

Whitman was very concerned about money – or rather, the Barnetts’ lack of it. He documents their salaries, rent payments, and charitable donations. He catalogs Barnett’s frugality, how she learns to repair Bob’s shoes, cut his hair, and prepare hamburgers 40 different ways. He points out they didn’t even take luggage to the Congo; friends cleaned huge steel drums from a Cedar Rapids bakery that once held shortening so the couple could pack five-years’ worth of clothing and supplies into them.

Ultimately, after considering whether there is something wrong with them, he concludes that there isn’t. Rather, they simply were in touch with their own true desires, however much these might be at odds with the rest of American society’s.

“It seemed that wherever Betty and Bob went. . . they would never be lonely, never without friends; for these two had a knack of being in love with every human being, and some of that love just couldn’t help being reflected right back at them,” he wrote.

“I know that this family has found success – and a very rare kind of success. They are rich without money. They are successful without power, fame, or glory,” Whitman concludes.

For three years, Bob worked as an evangelist and Barnett taught French. She introduced her class of 45 girls to the concept of underwear; shared cake and ice-cream with Africans, who were repulsed by the foods; kept an eye out for tarantulas on the huge stalks of bananas they harvested; bought their daughter a parrot; ate roasted wild boar, the most delicious meat she had ever had; and had several experiences with giant snakes.

“I was very happy there. I loved the people. We were going to spend a lifetime there,” Barnett says.

But it was not to be.

The Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960, but instead of forming a stable, pro-Western, central government, the nation descended into chaos. Congolese soldiers mutinied against their Belgian commanders at one military base, and the mutiny and violence quickly spread to other bases and throughout the nation. Atrocities against white people made the news, and the Barnetts, who had never been afraid before, were suddenly scared.

“We knew there were riots in Leopoldville, that’s the capitol, but we didn’t know how serious it was,” Barnett says, as they didn’t have newspapers or radio to keep them informed.

The missionary didn’t blame the Congolese; she could see that King Leopold had taken advantage of the people and enslaved them, putting them to work for 12 hours a day in underground gold mines, for example.

But ultimately, the Barnetts’ lives were in danger, and they had to be airlifted out. “The American Air Force flew over with helicopters and rescued us,” Barnett says.

A decade later, some missionaries returned to the Congo, but “we decided not to go back because we didn’t want our daughter to be in that situation,” Barnett says. Even today, violence persists in the country; abuses of power, protracted civil wars, and mismanagement of state resources have defined its character over the decades.

The Barnetts resumed American lives. Bob became a pastor, and Barnett taught first grade.

But she will always have her years of experience as a missionary in the Congo to look back on and to share with her friends at Pleasantview. She will always know love, and that very rare kind of success.

“And by the way, I joined the Mennonite Church,” she chuckles.