It was Labor Day weekend, and 19–year–old Dorothy Bair had been invited to a special evening service at her Salvation Army corps (church) to see the film ‘Congo Crusade.’ She was enjoying it but wasn’t thinking too much about it until the African man on the screen locked eyes with her and said, ‘My people need to know God. Who will go and tell them?’
“Instantly, I felt someone tapping me on the shoulder,” remembers Dorothy. But when she turned around, no one was there. When she felt the tapping again, she knew who it was.
“I thought, ‘Lord, you’ve got your wires crossed,’ ” she says. “ ‘There must be some mistake!’ ” But her pastors, Captains Andy and Joan Miller, were watching Dorothy, and they knew it was no mistake.
“Are you the one who is called?” they asked her. Dorothy didn’t know what to say. None of it made sense.
Unlikely candidate
Dorothy had grown up poor as the daughter of a church janitor who worked long hours and an abusive mother who spent her time gambling and carousing.
“My mother made it clear to me at a young age that she didn’t want me,” says Dorothy. As the only sister to three brothers, she had to shoulder most of the household chores. “I was a little girl forced to do the laundry for my whole family when I couldn’t even reach the opening to the machine,” she says. “I had lots of anger.”
Then, in the summer of Dorothy’s senior year in high school, she began volunteering at the offices of The Salvation Army. Immediately, she noticed something different about the lives of the people working there. “They had something I didn’t have, and I wanted it too. I didn’t know that something was someone—Jesus.”
Dorothy did find Jesus as her Savior, but she was still painfully shy. Brand new to The Salvation Army and the Christian faith, becoming an officer (pastor), much less a missionary, seemed impossible! So Dorothy remained skeptical—until she received a phone call from Captain Joan.
“God has a purpose for you,” she told Dorothy. “You have nothing going for you except your calling; but the one thing you do have is the certainty of that call.” Those words stuck with Dorothy and would help her through difficult times that lay ahead.
“My family was furious with my decision to go into the ministry,” she says. “Even I didn’t understand my call. I didn’t want it. But along the way, I learned that I could doubt my abilities but not the call.”
Donning the uniform
With her mind made up, both she and the Millers, who would become her lifelong mentors, began taking the steps necessary to send her to the School for Officer Training, a Salvation Army seminary. The first step was getting her a uniform. Dorothy remembers wearing it proudly to her job at the bank.
“But that didn’t last long,” she says with a laugh, “because one day the Millers received a phone call from the bank manager. He asked them, ‘
Does Dorothy Bair have to wear that uniform every day? People are starting
to wonder if she’s collecting for us or
for you!’ ”
Next, timid Dorothy was invited to be a speaker at a youth event—something she dreaded.
“As I stood before the crowd, I honestly thought I’d wet myself,” she says. “I’d brought notes, but my hands were shaking so badly that I kept dropping them. The third time they fell, I decided I’d better just leave them on the floor. It would be too embarrassing to drop them again.” Dorothy delivered her speech but felt so afraid that to this day, she has no clue what she said.
At the School for Officer Training, Dorothy had to overcome not only her shyness but also the doubts of others.
“I could never sit still in class,” she recalls. “I was used to working, not studying. Nobody there thought I would make it.” She proved them all wrong. She completed her training, became commissioned and ordained as a Salvation Army officer, and went on to work in a corps (church) and later a women’s residency program. Then, with the Salvation Army’s help, she went back to school for nurse’s training.
Nurse—then midwife!
Through all this, Dorothy never forgot her ultimate goal of serving in Africa. She decided to prepare herself further by applying to take courses in tropical diseases and African languages.
Instead, she received a congratulatory letter saying that she’d been accepted to a midwifery course in London! She thought there was some mistake. Little did she know that the “mistake” would lead her one step closer to fulfilling her calling.
Thirteen years after locking eyes with the man in the video, Dorothy was sent to South Africa to work as a nurse, nurse’s trainer, and midwife in a mission hospital. Later she also assumed the responsibilities of running a corps. There were many joys in the work but many challenges as well.
Zulu challenges
The first challenge was a huge cultural divide. The Zulu people practiced a spiritist religion, which influenced many of their beliefs, such as the nature of disease. Zulus believed that spirits, not viruses such as those transmitted by insects, make people ill. This made Dorothy’s medical work especially difficult.
“At first, the people didn’t trust us,” she says. “They believed that immunizations were a means to curtail their birth rates, not a means to cure diseases.” Dorothy tears up as she remembers burying a whole generation of children who were victims of a measles epidemic.
On top of this was the influence of witch doctors.
“Many of my patients would go to witch doctors in addition to coming to our clinic,” says Dorothy. “I learned to accept this traditional practice because I knew if I put it down, the witch doctors would keep people from visiting our clinic, and I would lose patients who needed me. The witch doctors feared our medicine, but even more, they feared losing their power and tribal influence.”
Dorothy recalls how the witch doctors themselves began coming to the clinic to receive treatment. “If you asked them about it, they would say, ‘Just to make sure, I’ll use my medicine and yours,’” she laughs.
Dorothy adapted well to Africa and came to accept many of the cultural practices different from her own, but there was one that filled her with deep sadness—female circumcision. This ritual took place when a girl was 10 to 12 years old and before she was promised to a husband. A girl or woman who has been circumcised cannot experience pleasure from intercourse; instead, it can be extremely painful. Dorothy describes the practice as “butchery” and says that once the procedure was performed, there was nothing she could do to alleviate her patients’ lifelong pain and suffering.
“Despite its obvious effects, it was a common Zulu practice, and the people couldn’t understand why I opposed it,” she says.
Another common Zulu practice that required a period of adjustment was polygamy. Zulu men marry multiple wives—as many as they can afford to pay a dowry for—and have children with each wife. Each wife has her own hut which makes up a Zulu family unit, known as a “crawl.”
“Things really got interesting when a couple accepted Christ and wanted to become Salvation Army officers,” says Dorothy. “I had to explain to them that this was only for one man and one woman.” If the man had no children, he had to divorce his other wives and begin a monogamous relationship. But if he was a father, the situation was more complicated.
“The children were dependent on their father’s income for survival,” says Dorothy. “Before I admitted any of these couples to training, I insisted that all of the husband’s children be provided for.”
Dorothy spent 21 years in Africa before returning to the states for health reasons in 2000. She retired as a major after 40 years of service as an officer and lives in Akron, Ohio, where she remains active in ministry as a coordinator and test–grader of a Bible correspondence course for incarcerated people and their families. Although she’s back on U.S. soil, her heart is still in Africa.
“In Africa, I learned how simple life could be,” says Dorothy. “God gave me a love for the people, and I never thought of their color or race.” Dorothy picks up a soapstone carving of a mother, father, and child embracing. It seems the perfect memento for a woman who delivered more than 350 babies while answering God’s call to share His love in Africa.
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