Cornelia Dalenberg was a registered nurse with three years of experience at West Side Hospital in Chicago when, in 1921, she decided to join the Arabian Mission.

This Christian organisation, founded in 1889 and headquartered in New York, operated several schools, hospitals, bookshops and orphanages across southern Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. Its four main mission stations were in Bahrain, Basra, Kuwait and Muscat.

After intensive Arabic language study, Ms Dalenberg arrived in 1922 at Bahrain’s Mason Memorial Hospital, now called American Mission Hospital (AMH). Her dedication to healthcare and the passion with which she performed her job are evident in all her letters and reports.

One of her many pleasant early memories, from March 1922, featured a boat ride to Muharraq. An excerpt from Neglected Arabia, page 8, issue 120, April-June 1922 read: “Of all our new and interesting experiences since we arrived in Bahrein (sic), I think the picnic at Moharrek (sic) was one of the happiest.”

Ms Dalenberg describes her first Arab meal as ‘one of the best experiences’ which was offered by Ayesha, their hostess in Muharraq. Alongside her two American companions, Regina Harrison (wife of missionary doctor Dr Paul Harrison) and Rachel Jackson, she enjoyed meeting many Arab women as they sat on straw mats in a thatched hut, experiencing the beauty of different cultures.

This US registered nurse went on to serve patients with great care under various doctors. She travelled to Oman, Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, helping doctors set up hospitals and clinics over the next 40 years.

Before her retirement in 1961, Ms Dalenberg presented an annual report on Arabian healthcare to the Reformed Church of America, demonstrating her in-depth knowledge about the region and its hospitals. She expressed mixed feelings about the changes in Bahrain brought by modernity and the discovery of oil.

In 1940, she remarked: “I continue to marvel at some of the changes that have taken place in Bahrain during the last decade. This is no longer an isolated island. Land planes and sea planes are heard overhead so often that the Arabs have come to take them for granted and do not even stop to look up when they hear them.

“A European visitor may arrive at the airport, be whisked away in a car, and be entertained in an air conditioned house at the oil camp and leave the island without so much as a glimpse of Arab life. It is to be hoped that no foreigner misses this opportunity, for life is missing a great deal if he comes to Bahrain and sees only oil, and the riches and comfort it has brought to some.”

On her choice of healthcare work in a mission hospital, even as newer hospitals emerged around the world, she wrote in 1954: “This has the joyous side. Perhaps it is the greatest contribution that Mission Hospitals make to this land. It certainly gives us wonderful opportunities as we go from bedside to bedside, sit and talk with groups here and there ... I would rather work here than in the best and the most modern hospital in the world.”

Get Noticed.

Send us your company’s news today and they could be featured on ABC’s Community News tommorow.