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around the green – campus
– Fun, fellowship are part of service trip to Hopi Mission School– Local contractor helps cure a campus recycling headache
– Nursing award winner has many years’ service in Hillsboro area
– Bethel’s first outdoor Commencement mirrors speaker’s advice to “open the world”
– Students reflect on a year of chapel-planning
– Saucedo helps Bethel get to know its southern constituents
– A nursing career that saw many changes closes at Bethel
Fun, fellowship are part of service trip to Hopi Mission School.
For college students, spring break is about escaping the academic routine for sun, fun and – house painting?
Twelve Bethel College students opted for paintbrushes and got the sun and fun besides when they decided to spend their break in early April volunteering at Hopi Mission School on the high desert of northeastern Arizona.
Mark Smith ’02, resident director of Haury Hall, organized the trip and, with Tim Buller ’96, assistant professor of system administration, accompanied the group. He had some personal reasons for suggesting Hopi Mission School. “Bethel groups have gone to the Gulf Coast [of Louisiana] the last couple of years for the spring break service trip,” he said. “I thought it would be good to go someplace different, plus my grandparents were there.”
That would be Doris and Jim Yoder of Newton, who have spent many weeks over the past five years volunteering their time on building projects – first the school’s gym, completed in 2005, then a volunteer center and now a duplex to house teaching staff.
Miriam Regier, Newton, who graduated from Bethel in May, went to New Orleans in 2006, less than six months after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had devastated large portions of the city. “That was a very good experience,” she said. “I wanted to do another service trip.” The same was true for Will Peterson, sophomore from Bonner Springs, who went on his first-ever service trip to southern Louisiana with a Bethel group in March 2007.
The group agreed that one of the best parts of the trip was learning to know some people they didn’t normally spend time with and discovering how well they all got along. Yue Yu, senior from Guang Dong, China, noted, “It was like in Acts 1. We had the same target and the same goal, we prayed together, and it all worked. That’s the meaning of service.”
Other students on the Hopi Mission School service trip were Jean Butts, junior from Cleveland, Ohio; Rachel Gaeddert, freshman from Larned; Krista Hostetler, freshman from West Liberty, Ohio; Blake Johnson, junior from Topeka; Elizabeth Lang, sophomore from Des Moines, Iowa; Sierra Pryce, freshman from Newton; Keila Quenzer, freshman from Visalia, Calif.; Paul Regier, junior from Newton; and Terra Wiens, freshman from Newton.
For the complete story, see http://www.bethelks.edu/bc/news_publications/news/bc/index.php/2008/04/21/fun_fellowship_are_part_of_service_trip_.Melanie Zuercher
Local contractor helps cure a campus recycling headache
It might look harmless enough, but that old computer and monitor stuffed in the back of the closet is a virtual storehouse of hazardous waste. So when Bethel College staff considered how to dispose of several hundred pieces of obsolete computer equipment, they knew it was more than a matter of finding a truck or trailer big enough to haul them away.
Fortunately, the college’s regular recycling contractor, Steve Meyer of South Central Recycling in North Newton, had come up with a solution: the Federal Prison Industries’ UNICOR program, whereby “e-junk” goes to prisons either to be repaired and reconditioned for reuse or taken apart for recycling of component materials. Last June, UNICOR opened a new electronics recycling facility at the Leavenworth prison.
Meyer, who has the household recycling contracts for the cities of North Newton and Sedgwick, has wanted to add electronics recycling, he said. But national news stories about “recycled” computers ending up in poor communities in countries like China and Nigeria, where they are unsafely disposed of in ways that endanger both people and the environment, made him hesitate.
Then he found out about UNICOR. In the meantime, Bethel College maintenance and information technology staff kept revisiting the question of what to do with all the discarded computers and monitors piling up in a basement room of the old Science Hall. Bethel IT personnel are responsible for about 200 computers on campus, about a fourth of which are replaced each year. They decided to contact Meyer, and this time he had an idea for what to do.
On April 4, Meyer brought his semi-trailer to campus and Bethel workers loaded more than 70 computers, at least twice as many monitors and a handful of Macintosh machines that combined both, plus some large boxes of miscellaneous keyboards, cables and other items.
“This is a good thing in many ways,” said Bethel College’s physical plant director Les Goerzen. “It cleans up hazardous waste, empties out items that have accumulated in the old Science Hall and is a good recycling measure. We are fortunate to have an environmentally conscious person like Steve as our recycling contractor.”
Melanie Zuercher
Nursing award winner has many years’ service in Hillsboro area
The Bethel Deaconess Hospital/ Bethel College Nursing Alumni Association presented its 2008 Outstanding Alumnus Award to Arlene Hett, Hillsboro, at the annual Bethel College Alumni Association banquet May 24.
Arlene (Peters) Hett graduated in 1969 from the Bethel Deaconess Hospital (BDH) School of Nursing. She worked at Hillsboro Community Medical Center (HCMC; formerly Salem Hospital) for almost 34 years in a variety of roles, including director of nursing for six years. Since June 2001, she has been employed as a nurse in the Emergency department of Via Christi-St. Francis Hospital in Wichita, where she was honored both as Employee of the Month (after three months there) and Employee of the Year (after one year). She continues to serve in the Hillsboro community by assisting ophthalmologist Terria Winn with cataract surgeries.
In addition to her years of employment in Hillsboro and Wichita, Hett worked for about a year as a house supervisor and medical floor staff nurse at St. Mary Hospital in Manhattan. She has been a certified lactation counselor since 1999 and has owned Best Beginnings, which provides lactation support and supplies to breast-feeding mothers, since 1998.
Arlene and Al Hett have four children – Audrey Hodgson ’96 (Wayne ’95), Suzanne Siemens ’05 (Grant ’01), Kevin Hett and Julie Marsh (Tyler) – and three grandchildren. They are members of Trinity Mennonite Church in Hillsboro. They served on the Bethel Parents’ Council when their daughter Audrey was a student.
Hett’s HCMC co-workers Velma Hadley (BDH ’58) and Nancy Kaufman ’82 wrote in a letter nominating Hett, “We are [deeply] appreciative of Arlene’s contribution to our community and honored to have her represent us in the health-care profession. She has given so much to us and the community that we desire for her to be recognized for her dedication and service to health care.”
The BDH/BCNAA Outstanding Alumnus Award is given on the basis of dedication to the nursing profession, demonstrated leadership ability and creativity, and outstanding professionalism, to an alumnus who has promoted and elevated the general nursing image and is held in high regard by peers and the community.
Melanie Zuercher
Bethel’s first outdoor Commencement mirrors speaker’s advice to “open the world”
Bethel’s 115th Commencement was certainly the most colorful in recent memory.
A major factor was the setting, outdoors under a bright blue Kansas May sky on the artificial turf of Joe W. Goering Field, the first time since 1941 that ceremonies were not held in Memorial Hall and, as far as anyone knows, the first time Bethel Commencement has ever been outside.
Another reason was an unusually high number of students from Africa. The 2008 graduates represented seven countries other than the United States, all of them African, with six students from Nigeria, three from Kenya, two from Tanzania and one each from Cameroon, Ethiopia, Niger and Togo. All but two of the students graduated with degrees in nursing.
Nursing students wore the traditional orange stoles to signify their degrees and the African students had stoles in the colors of their national flags as well. In addition, as has been the case for the past number of years, Bethel’s African-American Alumni Association presented every African-American graduate with a multi-colored Kente cloth stole.
The electronic carillon in the top of Memorial Hall played a peal of bells as the graduates took the traditional march around the Green and then headed past Memorial Hall to Thresher Stadium. As they entered the stadium, Director of Church Relations Dale Schrag ’69 rang the bell that has marked the “opening of school” since the mid-1970s.
Commencement speaker Janine Wedel ’78, a social anthropologist and a professor of public policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., echoed a theme from the annual Alumni Banquet of the night before, building her address, “Serious fun,” around life lessons to be learned from pranks.
“What I remember most [from my years as a Bethel student] is Bethel College’s common lore, the shared stories,” she said, many of which center around pranks pulled on campus over the years, a healthy number of them at the instigation of fictional perennial student Herman Bubbert.
“Cows have been known to visit the library,” she said. “Cars have appeared on top of buildings. Dining hall chairs have gone missing until finally discovered on a roof after weeks of us eating while sitting on the floor.”
She was reflecting on pranks, she said, from a social anthropologist’s perspective. Pranks reflect the community’s sense of trust among members, require flexibility, creativity and teamwork, demonstrate a sense of adventure and curiosity, and indicate willingness to question rules and upend the “natural order.”
Wedel said she had picked up many, if not all, of these values as a result of her Bethel education. Perhaps evoking the “wide open” feel of Bethel’s first outdoor Commencement, she said, “The spirit of pranks can open up the world,” which led her to study in Germany in her junior year and to take advantage of a chance to travel to Poland, an experience that “motivated me to want to learn more and has kept me going back to this day.”
Noting that the average college graduate today can expect to change jobs six times before retirement, her advice was: “More than the skills you acquired, your success may depend on your ability to adapt. Cultivate curiosity, a sense of adventure and [willingness to play] with the rules of life’s games, but honor the rules when they deserve to be, engage in teamwork and nurture your relationships.”
Christine Crouse-Dick, recipient of the Ralph P. Schrag Distinguished Teaching Award, seemed to epitomize Wedel’s words to the graduates. As Bethel Vice President for Academic Affairs Brad S. Born ’84 presented the award, he said, “Christine is a conscientious and committed teacher, ever interested in becoming better in her craft. From students, the praise goes beyond pedagogy to the content of her character. Her faculty colleagues are unanimous and effusive in their praise for her collaboration and her skillful work on all issues. One of them wrote, ‘She is a leader and at the same time a wonderful team player.’”
Crouse-Dick has a B.A. from Tabor College, Hillsboro, and earned her M.A. from Wichita State University. She has been teaching at Bethel since 2002. The Schrag Award is given to a faculty member judged to have made an outstanding contribution to teaching.
Bethel College President Barry C. Bartel ’84 conferred 51 bachelor of arts and 73 bachelor of science degrees. According to a survey of graduating seniors, 50 of the graduates intended to enter health- and social service-related careers, 15 business and 12 education. Of those who responded to the survey, 68 percent plan either to enter or apply for graduate school within the next year. “At least 10 will carry on a time- honored Bethel tradition by entering voluntary service assignments soon after graduation,” Born noted in introducing the class of 2008.
As the formal ceremonies drew to a close and students could shed their hot black robes and mortarboards, the green space of the football/soccer field and surrounding lawns turned into a flower garden as the brightly colored traditional dress of the African female students mirrored that of mothers, grandmothers and sisters now streaming out of the bleachers to congratulate them.
Melanie Zuercher
Students reflect on a year of chapel-planning
The final two chapels at Bethel College this year centered on favorite hymns and reflections on Bethel, both by graduating seniors – a tradition from the past number of years. In other ways, however, the Wednesday morning institution has been seeing some changes.
ost notably, this year Amy Barker, campus pastor, not only organized a group of students to help plan chapel services, which has been done before – she also gave them major responsibility for carrying chapel out.
“At the beginning, I laid out the dates for traditional chapels, such as favorite hymns and Ash Wednesday,” Barker says. “Then I said, ‘How would you like to fill in the rest?’ Finally, [one of the students] said, ‘Let’s try it.’ It has been successful because they owned it.”
“My personal vision for chapel is to keep incorporating the traditional with the new,” said Greg Shelly, junior from Lenexa. “With the new planning, we are trying to incorporate more members of the body so we together can function as a whole here at Bethel.”
Several crisis situations involving students this school year gave chapel a different feel as well. Freshman Lindsay Geisler spoke about struggling with cancer her last year in high school. Junior Sunita Pudasaini and sophomore Brittany Voth were both involved in potentially life-threatening car accidents around Thanksgiving. Lynnet Maidhi, a junior from Kenya, went home at Christmas to visit her family and got caught in post-election violence in her country at the end of the year. These events became part of chapel services later.
“One chapel, in particular, that I helped plan [was when] Brittany Voth and CJ Unruh [a junior who was in a serious car accident several years ago] shared their ‘death to life’ stories during the Easter season,” said Maya Kehr, sophomore from Goshen, Ind. “It was an incredibly powerful service. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the chapel after they spoke. There is a lot of value in the honest sharing of students that draws other students in.”
In another chapel, Maidhi told of learning that her family’s home had been burned to the ground and of being unable to get back to Kansas in time for her January nursing class. She and five other Bethel students from Kenya led the music and worship for that service. “As Kenyans, we have seen violence,” Maidhi told the chapel congregation. “It’s not easy, but we try to share love in the face of violence. I’m standing here to say that yes, there is a God who loves us.”
The students on the chapel planning committee have also experienced some personal growth as a result of their deeper involvement in chapel.
“Some of the results of our planning have helped to nurture my faith,” Kehr said. “There have been some incredibly poignant and powerful moments that I’m not sure can or should just be attributed to the efforts of students, but hopefully we can give the credit to God.”
She has been encouraged by several faculty to explore the Ministry Inquiry Program, and is thinking seriously about it for next summer, she said.
In addition to Kehr and Shelly, the student members of the chapel committee this year were Miriam Regier, senior from Newton; Kyle Unruh, sophomore from Goessel; Max Wedel, junior from Tucson, Ariz.; Sharayah Williams, sophomore from Kalona, Iowa; and Nathaniel Yoder, junior from Kalona.
Melanie Zuercher
Saucedo helps Bethel get to know its southern constituents
An exchange between a Mennonite youth pastor from San Antonio, Texas, and a Bethel College administrator and Texas-based staff person is helping the college and its constituency to the south get better acquainted.
Hugo Saucedo spent April 7-9 on the Bethel campus as pastor-in- residence, giving up tickets to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament final being played April 7 in his hometown. While at Bethel, he was able to share his perspective on the profound implications that the changing face of Mennonite Church USA, from predominantly German-Anglo to vibrantly multi-cultural, has for the MC USA colleges.
As the Texas-based conference youth minister for Western District Conference (WDC), the division of MC USA in which Bethel is geographically located, Saucedo works with many Hispanic pastors and the youth from their congregations. “We need to partner with leaders like Hugo to ensure that we are responding to the needs of Hispanic Mennonite churches,” said Bethel President Barry C. Bartel ’84.
Two weeks after Saucedo visited Bethel, Bartel and then-admissions counselor Cory Ferralez (he has since resigned), based in Livingston, Texas, joined – at Saucedo’s invitation – a group of mid-Texas Mennonite pastors at an April 26 gathering in San Antonio. On May 14, Sandra Martinez-Montez, a church plant support worker for WDC, and youth worker Janinna Quintanilla, both from Dallas, along with Madeline Maldonado, associate pastor of Iglesia Menonita Arca de Salvacion, Fort Myers, Fla., made a one-day campus visit.
Saucedo was impressed by much of what he found at Bethel, he said. Perhaps what struck him most, he said, was how welcoming faculty and staff were of him and how much obvious care there is for students. “My experience with Bethel faculty and staff was wonderful. I see a real culture of cooperation and caring for the students.”
For the full story, see: http://www.bethelks.edu/bc/news_publications/news/bc/index.php/2008/05/02/saucedo_helps_bethel_get_to_know_its_sou.
Melanie Zuercher
A nursing career that saw many changes closes at Bethel
Verda Deckert didn’t think she’d be at Bethel College long enough to retire.
Eighteen years later, however, she finds herself ending her nursing career there – one that has covered everything from supporting a voluntary service unit as a nurse in Saskatchewan, working as a public health nurse in Oklahoma, weathering the merger of Bethel Deaconess and Axtell Christian Hospitals into Newton Medical Center, and teaching nursing management to at least 500 different students in 18 class years of nurses at Bethel. Deckert is perhaps the only person who graduated from both the Bethel Deaconess and Bethel College (B.S.N., 1965) nursing programs and later went on to teach in both.
Every year for 18 years at Bethel, Deckert taught the Management class. For many of those years, she also taught Community Nursing. In the former, she taught “not just [how to manage] a group of patients, but also basic management of staff, quality improvement, performance appraisal and a mini-introduction to the finances of health.”
The latter course, Community Nursing, is one of the Bethel program’s particular emphases. Community Nursing teaches students “the role that B.S.N. nurses can have in the community,” Deckert says. “They don’t usually get into that right away [in a first job] but they need to know where patients can get care besides at the hospital – for example, community health agencies, hospice, public schools, home health agencies or [on-site in] industries.” The course also focuses on care of various culture groups intensively enough to meet cross-cultural learning (CCL) requirements.
Two of Deckert’s favorite memories from her time at Bethel involve her daughters, Natasha and Maria, who both completed the Bethel nursing program, in 1995 and 1996, respectively.
A number of things have changed in 18 years. When asked the question, Deckert’s prompt first answer is “Computers,” followed by “Cell phones and PDAs [personal digital assistants] for the students. They have their nursing diagnosis book, their drug book, their Taber’s Medical Dictionary, all on the PDA.”
Other significant changes have included the ability to search online for any journal article, lecturing with PowerPoint® and the use of computer simulators in teaching.
For the full story, see: http://www.bethelks.edu/bc/news_publications/news/bc/index.php/2008/ 06/12/a_nursing_career_that_saw_many_changes_c.
Melanie Zuercher