Harold Martin Ottemoeller

1. 6/16/22, Grand Island, Nebraska USA
2. 5/2/97, Porterville, California USA

Spouse/Family

Wife: Mary Alice (nee Tritch), b. 11/14/32; Lafe, Arkansas USA

1. 1/21/1951

Children: Sylvia Rose Ottemoeller/Stark (1951), Stephen Harold Ottemoeller

(1953), Cheryl Ruth Peterson (1954), Gala Marie Autumn Ley (1957), Linda Grace Fricke (1962)

 

Dates of Service Field Call Assignment

1948-1989 Nigeria Missionary, Church Planter,

Acting Superintendent, Manager of Schools, House parents to missionary children, relief worker.

Biographical Summary

From the time Harold Ottemoeller was ten years old, he wanted to be a missionary to Africa.  Inspired by a missionary to China who visited his home church, led by his pastor in rural Nebraska, and encouraged by his parents to pursue this calling, he attended prep school at St. Paul, Missouri before enrolling in Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.  As part of his seminary training, two years were spent in vicarages.  After graduating in 1947, he spent a year ministering to African-American churches in San Francisco and in 1948 he began his work in Nigeria.

 

During his first tour in Nigeria, he became deathly ill with typhoid, malaria, and pneumonia, but through divine intervention he survived and was strengthened in his conviction to spend his life in Africa serving his Savior and the people of Nigeria.  During his recuperation in the United States, he met and married Mary Tritch of Terra Bella, California in 1951 and then served as a pastor/teacher in African-American communities in Camden and near Selma, Alabama for a year before returning to Nigeria.

 

Harold’s work in Nigeria included periods of service to Efik and Ibibio peoples (1952-1960). During this time he served as acting superintendent of the mission field in Nigeria and manager of Lutheran Church schools, and was involved in church planting.

 

In 1954, Harold participated in a survey with a team of missionaries into an area north of the existing mission field where he knew there was very little Christian witness.  This survey resulted in moving his family, along with a Nigerian pastor, to the Ogoja area in the savannah 400 miles north of the coast.  Witness to the Yache people and other tribes in the Ogoja area (1957-1972) included involving missionaries to help analyze and translate the Bible into local languages, as well as ministering to the peoples’ sanitation, agricultural, medical and spiritual needs.  During this time, he implemented immunization programs to combat smallpox and cholera epidemics, introduced agricultural methods that led to higher crop yields and set up dispensaries for the sick and wounded.  In all he and Mary did, they witnessed to the Nigerians by showing the love of Jesus through their actions, preaching, teaching, and healing.  Although much of his preaching was done in informal settings with interpreters, he quickly recognized the need for people to have the Bible and other literature in their own language.  He participated in efforts of LCMS to recruit and train linguists who could analyze unwritten languages and translate the Scriptures into the language of the people.

 

In 1960 and 1961 (on the way to and from a furlough in the U.S.) the Ottemoeller family spent two 3-month stints in Ghana where Harold assisted in establishing the Lutheran Church in Ghana.  In 1967 and 1968 Harold spent time as a relief worker during and following the Nigerian (Biafran) civil war.  The war made it necessary for many missionaries to leave their posts, including Harold and his family who resided in Jos, Northern Nigeria for those two years.

 

Throughout their time in Nigeria, Mary was involved in ministry while also caring for their five children.  Sylvia was born in Alabama before they went to Nigeria as a family.  Stephen, Cheryl, Gala and Linda were born in Eket where the mission hospital was located.  The children all attended boarding school for most of their first twelve years, although Mary homeschooled several of them one or two years before they left for boarding school.

 

An important change took place while Harold and Mary were in Nigeria – all LCMS children were able to continue their education in Nigeria through high school.  Before joining the inter-denominational 12-year Hillcrest School in Jos, LCMS children were schooled in Obot Idim through 8th grade and then sent to the United States for further education. Led by the Ottemoellers in 1966, Evangelical Lutheran Mission (ELM) House was procured and the LCMS began its cooperation in Hillcrest, with Harold and Mary serving as house parents for the first year.  It is a devastating thing to send a child away to boarding school at the age of six or seven.  In fact, the greatest sacrifice for the Ottemoellers was not leaving their family to go to Nigeria, but sending their children to boarding school and then to the U.S. for college.  Their peace came from their strong conviction that the Holy Spirit guided them in their mission work and would protect their children wherever they were.

 

Mary’s ministry to others included teaching sewing to the women teachers at a local girls’ school, teaching Bible to students at another girls’ school, conducting a back door clinic for those who came for medical help, teaching health and Bible classes in the village and helping with a well baby clinic organized by Dorlie Goodger, a lifelong friend who spend some years in Nigeria as a nurse.  Although she had no formal medical training, Mary learned to dispense medications and sew up lacerations for the local villages.

 

In 1972 Harold and Mary were asked to leave their mission station in the south of Nigeria for an extended period to again fill the position of house parents at ELM House.  Three of their children had already finished high school and gone to the United States for college.  For the next nine years, they were house parents to 94 children, 30 at a time, and were loved and honored by the missionary children living there.  Caring for the spiritual, emotional and physical needs of 30 children ages 6-18 was a huge task.  Mary’s time was devoted to caring for the children around the clock.

 

During this time, Harold became involved in the Sahelian drought efforts in Niger and, after securing financial support from Lutheran World Relief, organized a program to distribute food and seed to the most remote areas of Niger that included two of his children, Stephen and Cheryl, as well as his nephew Dan Ottemoeller.  While he directed this work, other mission staff helped Mary care for the needs of the missionary children.

 

From 1980 to 1984 Harold’s ministry to the Fulani herdsman during an epidemic of the virus of rinderpest resulted in approximately four million cattle being saved or protected from the disease.  This ministry to over 40,000 Fulanis showed them the extraordinary love of God for all people. They understood that Harold served because of his love for Jesus and his love for the Fulanis whose livelihood had been preserved.  To show their great respect and admiration for him, they gave him the name Bature Fulani, which means “white Fulani.”

 

In 1984 and 1985, again under the auspices of Lutheran World Relief, Harold served refugees in drought-stricken and war-torn Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia.

 

In numerous instances over the years, Harold’s love of the people he was serving threatened his own personal safety.  When faced with arrest and imprisonment for importing more rinderpest vaccine than he had import licensing for, he stood firm and obeyed his “higher” command and continued to supply the vaccine to those in need.  Even those who would have charged him were awed by his courage and faith in his God.  When traveling in Tigre, Eritrea and Ethiopia, he risked his life and traveled by night, hiding under trees and camouflage during the day to avoid the bombing and bringing grain to people who were without.  His time as a relief worker in war-torn Nigeria during the riots and civil war took him to areas that were not always safe.  His faith was steadfast and his service to those in need was unwavering.

 

Mary’s time in Nigeria ended when a heart valve condition forced her return to the United States for open heart valve-replacement surgery in 1984.  She settled in her home town (Terra Bella, California) and assisted her mother while Harold continued to work in Nigeria.  His last few years were spent ministering to Fulanis, and in 1989, a heart attack brought him back to Terra Bella where he and Mary lived until his death in 1997.  Mary lives in Merced, California near three of her children.

 

Nota Bene

Harold received Honorary Doctorates from Concordia Seminary in Ft Wayne and Christ College Irvine (now Concordia University at Irvine) and a Distinguished Alumni Award form Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

 

Phase 2 Information

Biggest missiological issue faced?

Mary remembers that one of the first and main issues Harold and other missionaries faced in building the church in Nigeria was that of polygamy.  People who became Christian were told that part of a Christian life was for each man to have only one wife.  However, the practice of polygamy was so ingrained that it was difficult for a man to give up all but one wife, and there was the question of where the wives who were given up would go.  Besides this, men usually did not want to retain the first wife they had married since a younger wife was able to do more work.

 

Fighting the rinderpest disease that ravaged the herds of the Fulani people was a difficult but important job.  Harold’s work on this problem was complicated by the fact that the vaccine he was delivering came from Israel, and this did not please the Muslim people of the area.  However, he kept working and managed to save many cattle.

 

Harold was always interested in expanding the scope of mission work as much as possible.  That the missionaries should spread their work to different areas was an issue that weighed on his mind and heart.  This was one reason he felt blessed to participate in the survey of, and then move his own work to, the Ogoja area further north.

 

Most significant contribution during missionary service?  

Throughout his time in Africa, in every endeavor, Harold exemplified Jesus’ admonition to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned.  His life of dedication to bring hope and health was an inspiration to many as he trained new Christians to work among their own people as witness to their faith.  The hearts of many people were won by his active demonstration of love and concern in the name of Jesus Christ.

 

Connection to today’s mission?

The Lutheran Church of Nigeria remains a well-established sister and partner church of the LCMS.  Some mission projects are ongoing, and of the missionaries that served at the same time as Harold, Ed and Wilma Rupprecht have returned to Nigeria under the auspices of Lutheran Bible Translators to help with literacy programs and to cull old primers and other books (many of which lay in storage for many years) for literacy lessons and exercises.

 

Lessons Learned

• Learning the local language is very important for establishing rapport with people in the place to which one is sent.  This is important for all members of a missionary family.  At the time the Ottemoellers served, Harold learned quite a bit of language but there was not as much of a focus on having missionary wives learn, so Mary often found her interactions with people frustrating simply because she could not communicate.  She did eventually learn language used at home and in the market and enough to work in the dispensary.  There’s so much work to be done on the mission field that it’s tempting to want to start “doing” right away, but the time spent to gain language skills is crucial as work moves forward.
• Orientation to a mission field should include local practices!  Mary learned this first-hand because in the areas where they lived, it’s considered polite to hand things to someone with one’s right hand (the right hand is considered cleaner because the left is used for dirty tasks).  Mary is left-handed, and so it was more natural for her to use her left hand for most things.  And the people of the area were so forgiving of the foreigner that she never realized that she was breaking a cultural rule until seven years into her life in Nigeria!  Only when a visitor from another area scolded her for handing something over with her left hand did she realize what was going on.  It would have helped to have received some training in this and other cultural practices.

 

Best Practices

• Mary notes that “witness to the whole person” is a necessary part of mission.  In addition to proclaiming the Gospel, it was always important that the missionaries in their field set up a dispensary or a medical facility so they could witness to both spiritual and physical needs.  This is especially true in some non-Western cultures where spiritual and physical needs are perceived as very intertwined.
• One example of this type of witness was Harold’s helping people to find ways of getting enough good water.  After the Ottemoellers moved north, where water was scarcer, one of the first things Harold did was to help the people of the village locate good spots for wells and dig the wells.  He trained workers from the village where they lived who could then go to surrounding villages and help the people of those villages do the same thing.  His work for the “whole person” and demonstration of Christian care for his neighbors was a strong witness.
• Establishment of health clinics and continuing education structures can be a very positive thing for missions.  In more recent times the governments of countries do not always permit these structures to be established.  But if it is allowed, it’s a good practice.

 

Phase 3 Information

 

Inspiration for entering foreign missions?

Harold wanted to be a missionary from a very early age.  When he was young, a woman who had worked in China came to stay and speak at his church for a period of time, and he grew fascinated by her stories of life on the mission field.  At seminary, he served as chairman for the association of students who wanted to be missionaries, requested and read all the information the Mission Board produced about mission work in Africa, and was vocal about his desire to do mission, particularly in Africa.  And when call time came, he received the call he had hoped for!

 

Mary had never had any thought of going overseas before she met Harold and they were married.  Harold had already served one term overseas when he came back to recuperate from illness and they met at a Walther League summer camp.  She knew that he planned to go back to Africa and to remain there for his career, and she accepted that if she married him, the life of a missionary would be hers as well.  While still in the U.S. prior to their marriage, Harold did some traveling to churches to show slides about his work in Nigeria, and Mary accompanied him.  From hearing his talks and seeing his slides she became excited about mission work as well.

 

Quotation by/about or brief story:

• From daughter Gala: “The most wonderful thing about my father was his ability to love a person the moment he met them, without judgment.  This was a gift and his beauty of spirit was easy to see. His greeting was so genuine and kind.  He and my mother always endeavored to walk as an example of Jesus’ love, welcoming many into their home and life.

 

“As children we adored him and so looked forward to time with him. We loved to wrestle (all of us children at once) with him on the floor.  He tickled us till we giggled “uncle”.  He read stories to us at bedtime with such expression and joy, and we could not wait to listen.  He would never miss a chance to kiss and hug us goodnight or hello. And I can still hear his voice singing the Hallelujah chorus in the “Messiah’.  He and our mother loved classical music, so we do too.  We sang along with Gilbert and Sullivan plays, and still have great appreciation for good music.  Our parents loved museums, churches, national parks, mountains and beautiful places, so we all experienced this too.

 

“Dad always assumed that all five of us could equally succeed at whatever we set out to do, and had great faith in all of our abilities.  He was a true support for all women and for career women on the mission field.

 

“He always honored and loved our mother, Mary, in a special way.  We could see this everyday.  Our Daddy left us with loving memories.  We are blessed to have led such a full life and to have shared it with him.”

 

• From son Stephen: “In addition to being a devoted husband and father, Harold was a sportsman, sports fan and outdoors adventurer.  He was an avid hunter and had the opportunity to hunt a variety of African animals, from birds to small game to some of Africa’s larger and more dangerous game animals, including African forest buffalo (also known as “bush cow”) and large antelope.  He often was called upon by local villagers to help them deal with troublesome or rogue animals, including a hippopotamus and a lion.  When he first moved to Ogoja, he was told of a rogue elephant that was damaging crops, but he and a fellow missionary ended up in trees.  He never got a shot off, which was a good thing because the gun he had at the time was much too small.

 

“He took advantage of travel opportunities to and from Nigeria to expose his family to unique adventures, including a camping trip through Europe and trips across the United States by car and train.  He also organized and led two family trips across the Sahara Desert as an adventurous means of getting vehicles from Europe to Nigeria.  Harold was an avid University of Nebraska football fan and spent many a night into the early morning hours listening to their games when they were available on Armed Forces Radio Service.”