When I was elementary school age, we had some really fun extended family gatherings at Grandma Katie and Grandpa Allen's house on the bluff above Port Townsend Bay. One of the more exciting activities was clam digging at low tide. Helen was instrumental in making this a grand adventure for all. Grandpa Allan would provide the shovels and expert advice. The adults, including John, Mary and Helen and all the kids would head down the path to the beach at the beginning of low tide. We learned how to stick our toes in a possible clam hole. If it squirted out, it was a clam and the digging was on, with probably 4 or 5 excited kids at a hole. By the end of low tide, we often had a couple buckets of horse neck clams. And the Van Houten family knew how to make a whole entire fun day out of digging clams, cleaning clams out in the yard and making clam chowder. 

Helen was always good at adding energy and enthusiasm and making even the ordinary fun.

I am glad for all the experiences I was able to share with her as my aunt and my Mom's sister.

Good morning, Keta.

I hope the following exchanges and outpouring of affection from some of Helen's Friends in Kenya will offer some comfort to you and the Family. We are thinking of, and praying for, you all.

Thank you Raquel I sent an SMS and Keta responded saying what she had sent to you. We have to pray for Helen that she be at peace and she knows we all love her. Thank you... that is a beautiful tribute for an amazing woman who was so thoughtful of other people. Helen is now at peace but her life and love will live on. Sister Loretta

May her soul rest in eternal peace. She was the most loving and kind human being, who ever walked on the face of this earth. We will fondly remember Helen. May God comfort you all. Beautiful tribute 🖕 Wambui Kang'ethe

how very sad. What a simply brilliant friend. Gosh I will miss her. Can you send me Keta's contact. Many thanks... Christie Peacock Ohh sorry for the loss but God had given her many years to live are we going to US. hv a blessed night. Rev Richard Kamau

May her soul rest in perfect peace... Dianne Koigi

Oh no, May our Father rest her soul in peace... Peter Thuo

May she rest in peace... Linda Lynet Kamau

👆 woiyi......true I also feel very very sad. I spoke with her 3 days ago but she sounded very low. I didn't know it was the last time to speak to her. Tks so much for sharing photo of my dear auntie. I really missed to c her... Hellen Karago

May her memory be eternal...🙏 Evans Mungai

Thank you for sharing. “In life and death, we belong to God.” Bob and I were trying to remember her 80th birthday that we attended with you! Beautiful- Thanks and peace! Rev. Beth Braxton

Oh. Pole. All the best. Raphael Ng'ethe

Yes l do have and do speak to her quite regularly. I haven’t for a couple of months because of all kinds of challenges here. Pls remind me the time difference? Rachel l tried a few times to reach Helen. It just rings and rings. What’s happening with her? Tried calling you as well. Thanks for letting me know. Okay thanks. Maybe you meant to send above to Helen? Yes of course i would go visit her. No l did not even try to call. I don’t know if she is able to take calls. Can she? I got a voicemail at Keta’s number but decided not to leave a message. We pray all is well and we shall speak to our friend again soon. Yes Keta sent me that message too. I will light a candle and pray. I feel like a part of me went with her. I will miss her so much. Sunita Kapila

Helen was my grandfather's first cousin. I talked to her on the phone last summer after visiting her brother in Montana. I have seen the bridge her father was killed on in Gravity, Iowa and visited his grave. 

Mary Anne Fitzgerald wrote, “I was introduced to Helen as someone who could help us with printing and layout in the office. We soon became firm friends. She loved to go on safari as I did and we were both interested in photography. Did I meet Cheryl through Helen or did I meet Helen through Cheryl? I can’t remember. The three of us did many trips into Maasailand. For Helen it evolved into her long relationship with David Paswa and his family. In typical Kenya fashion, it had its ups and downs with disappointments and many rewards.

“Helen was generous and supportive as a friend and always ready to conquer another frontier. When she moved out of the house that Rachel bought, I visited after work to find her sitting on a stool in the middle of the empty sitting room and looking at a map of the world to see where she might travel to next.

“She taught me a valuable lesson that has always stayed with me. We can’t meet everyone’s expectations just as friends and family may not live up to our expectations. She was so right. It has helped me stay friends with many people over the years.

“The photo of her relaxing in the courtyard during the 2007 post-election violence is particularly poignant. It was very dangerous moving around the town. I tried to deter Helen from going out to meetings but she would have none of it. Off she went every morning and, thankfully, back she came safe and sound in the afternoon.

“Helen could be obstinate and frustrating but I loved her for all the many good things she brought to our friendship. One was unquestioning loyalty. May she rest in peace.”

Joan Baxter wrote in her 1993 diary, “Helen is gentle, wise, and brilliant. She is unassuming, kind and giving. She works all the time, but she’s also very willing to help when I need it. And I am going to need it a lot in this job. I’m so fortunate she’s here.” Joan continues now, “That was just the beginning.

“After a few months, Helen became far more than just a senior colleague and mentor on all things science editing and publishing. She became a mother and sister, best friend and confidante, all in one slim, elegant, fast-walking, quick-witted and witty woman, with a laugh that rings in my mind even now. We laughed a lot, and occasionally we cried together.

“She could also be a no-nonsense person you didn’t want to mess with. Especially when it was about misplaced commas, which I quickly learned I could never get right (I still can’t, Helen, and I can hear your voice calmly explaining the finer points of punctuation every time I am writing, like right now).

“Despite her remarkable patience, Helen’s patience could still run out when she was confronted with sloppy writing, stacked modifiers, jargon … overbearing bosses….

“She was a perfectionist, a force to be reckoned with, but a deeply compassionate one with an oversized capacity for adventure and get-up-and-go-anywhere.

“At ICRAF, Helen put together and led a remarkable and talented team of editors, writers, designers, publishers, and librarians. My clearest memories of the four years I spent with Helen and that team in the 1990s are the fun we all had together. At work, and in all sorts of other places too.

“We celebrated Christmases on the coast with Helen and other friends. She also joined up at Diani Beach for my 40th birthday, and that night, Helen – the indefatigable – was the dancing queen at a nightclub she chose, wanting to dance the night away. I owe her so, so much.

“Many do….

“I miss her. What a life she lived, and what a woman she was. RIP, dear Helen.”

Susan MacMillan wrote that Joan Baxter “and Helen started? / transformed? Agroforestry Today into a superb magazine that also offered ICRAF’s many stakeholders an opportunity to respond and engage further. Real two-way engagement before that became fashionable!”

 “I first met Helen through a mutual friend in Kenya, Cynthia Salvadori, when I returned to Kenya in the fall of 1984.

“She went on to change my life. Not once or twice but at least three times.

“I’d lived in Kenya from 1972-1980, teaching English in Nyanza and Baringo schools, but had returned to America in 1980 to get a master’s degree from Berkeley. While saving money to return to Kenya, I worked as an editor of two academic/literary publications in Berkeley and San Francisco. So when I returned to Kenya in 1984, I was looking for an editing job, not a teaching job.

“As my luck would have it, Helen was then working as an editor in Nairobi, where I ended up editing Hilary Ng’weno’s Weekly Review magazine. Helen and I would meet for lunch somewhere in the city centre and spend an hour or so fervently discussing the finest details of editorial minutiae, or complaining of the arrogance of not-so-great writers, or of Nairobi publishers who extracted blood from editorial labours for pay so low it didn’t pay Nairobi rents….

“This was, truly, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. A mentor, a friend, a colleague, Helen was the wisest, and soundest, person I had ever met. And an unfailing friend through thick and thin.

“Her advice on occasions changed my life. In 1986, Helen was asked to serve as rapporteur for a conference on livestock-wildlife conflicts held in Taita, Kenya. She didn’t have the time to take it on. I didn’t either, as I was working 24/7 at the political magazine Weekly Review. But I was hungry for extra income and sold my Weekly Review boss on the idea of printing and publishing the book that would come out as a result of the conference. That editing job introduced me to ‘science editing’, which of course was Helen’s specialty.

“Then in 1988, Helen was the candidate of choice to head up the ICIPE Science Press, based out at Nairobi’s Duduville, but she decided to take a job in Ethiopia instead. So she pushed me to apply, as editing a weekly political magazine under the watch of Sarah Elderkin was giving me the heebie-jeebies. Although ICIPE badly wanted Helen, they took me on as very much a second best. I had a wild time there (it was a wild period at ICIPE) and decided the leave ICIPE after a year and a half and apply for some small NGO communications job, which I thought might suit me best. I thought of moving back up country and building a small quiet life somewhere. Maybe I’d teach again.

“Helen would have none of that. She sternly told me to consider that I might be just as satisfied making a decent salary as I would remaining poor.

“So in 1988, taking her advice for a third time, I applied to be science editor/writer at the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Diseases, also in Nairobi. And that, as they say, was that. I worked there for 33 deeply satisfying years, retiring only in 2021 and am still consulting for that institute (now known as ILRI) full time.

“That is how I developed a career I love, a profession I love, and a life I love here in Kenya. I don’t know what my trajectory would have been if I had not met Helen, and if Helen had not taken me under her (capacious) wing—and then deposited bread crumbs along my path. But it would not have been anything like the profoundly satisfying career I found with her direction.

“And of course she did the same for so, so many others. I’ve lost count over these decades how many editors and communications experts I’ve run into (or hired) who were taught their technical editing skills by Helen at Nairobi Polytechnic and elsewhere. To a one, they not only talk about how much they admired her but how much they leaned on her ‘life wisdom’.

“And I know that this part of Helen’s life is just one of many parts. She had an extraordinary life before and after Kenya. She was an adventurer always. She was clear-eyed about human foibles but loved people all the same. She taught me about that as well.

“So my heart as well as career is in debt to Helen. If I have been able to do any good, to help a few other communicators along their way, or to help a few people understand a scientific issue a bit better, that, too, is due largely to my extraordinary luck in meeting Helen nearly four decades ago. And to my extraordinary privilege in being a part of her extraordinary life.

“I’m sure Helen would take a red pencil to my words above. That she will no longer be doing that is a crime. But she taught us well. And that is something.”