Biography

Esther Bacon was born in Burlington, Colorado in 1916 to Anna and Alva Bacon. When she was five, Anna and Bacon moved to Sioux City, Iowa to be closer to Anna’s sister Nora Leander. While there she became a dedicated member of the Christian Missionary Alliance Church. She decided to attend the Lutheran Hospital School of Nursing to pursuing a career in nursing. After graduating in 1937, she worked multiple nursing jobs in Iowa over two years. Anna Bacon died in 1939 of pneumonia, leaving Esther Bacon in the hands of Nora Leander. Bacon decided to make her own way in the world rather than be a burden on her aunt by becoming a missionary nurse for the United Lutheran Board of Foreign Missions. The Board intended to send her to China as nurses were in high demand there. Then the Japanese invaded China making travel there impossible. In May of 1941 Bacon was given a position in India, which also became impossible to get to. Five months later she received a new posting in Zorzor, Liberia. After three weeks of dodging German U-Boats in the Atlantic, Bacon finally arrived in Liberia only to learn that the doctor at Zorzor had been drafted into the United States military and was headed back to North America. She made the five day trek from the coast to Zorzor with five other missionaries, none of whom had medical training. For the next three months she would be the only medical staff member at the Zorzor mission. Bacon’s specialty was in prenatal and postpartum care, which were a rare occurrence at the mission clinic as the local tribes did not trust the missionaries with anything but the most extreme cases. After about a year and many visits to local rural towns to talk about what the doctors did at Zorzor, Bacon finally was called out to help a woman dying after a stillbirth. She was able to save the woman’s life. Then more and more calls for aid from Bacon came to the clinic. By the late 1960’s Bacon had made a name for herself in Liberia and throughout the Lutheran missionary organization. She had founded a school for nursing at Zorzor to train local women and men instead of relying on people from the United States. On average she had nearly nine-hundred women come to her clinic every year for help with maternity issues. She had been given the name Bayka, the local translation of Bacon’s surname, and had delivered over 20,000 children. In 1972 a woman came to clinic pregnant and ill with a hemorrhagic fever. Bacon took the case and managed to save both the woman and child. Three days later Bacon collapsed with a high fever and was sent to the larger hospital in Phebe. Two days later she died after just having been diagnosed with Lassa fever, a hemorrhagic disease that can only be treated by an antibody transfusion from a survivor. She was buried outside the maternity ward she worked at for thirty years.

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