Helen Julia VanHouten was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on 1 June 1927. Katharine Findley VanHouten, her mother, lived in Lenox, Iowa, but she trusted the doctor in Indianapolis to deliver her children because he had saved her life when treating her overactive thyroid. Katharine was 33 years old and WC VanHouten, a lawyer, was 49. Helen was joined by twins two years later, John Oliver and Mary Katharine. They had a good life in a small town until WC “Van” was killed when the car he was riding in spun on ice, throwing him into the ditch and breaking his neck. Helen was eight and the twins six. The family lived in poverty because Van’s family did not like Katharine. She had insisted on an unsuccessful lawsuit to compel the VanHoutens to contribute to their mother’s care. Katharine sold Spencer’s corsets and magazines to schools. To earn money to help the family Helen delivered the out-of-town newspapers on her bicycle in a town with a population of 1,000. The boys delivered the local paper. She and her siblings detasselled corn in the summer. Her home had running cold water but no toilet. The family valued good grammar, healthy food, and education. She graduated at the top of her class of 23 in 1945. She was offered a full scholarship to the University of Iowa at Ames, but the principal mailed the paperwork two weeks late. Instead Helen left home at 17 to join her cousin Ethel in southeast Alaska. She got a clerical job and was one of eight single women at a navy base on Kodiak Island. She met Gary (Gerald Max) Daetz on a blind dinner date. He was smart and loved nature. She was smitten. They married eight days later on Kodiak. He had not wanted her to write her mother for approval because he knew her mother would say no. They moved to Chugiak, an uninhabited island with no stream and an abandoned cabin, hoping to live the wilderness life. She delivered her first child, David Gary Daetz on 7 September 1947 at the hospital in Ketchikan, Alaska. Three months later, back on Chugiak, tragedy struck. Before taking a walk with Helen, Gary put wood in the oven to dry; it smoldered. When they returned and opened the cabin door the smoke filled cabin burst into flames with baby David inside. The cabin was razed to the ground.

They moved to Corvallis, Oregon where they hoped to study marine biology. Gary used the GI bill to go to college. Helen worked as a clerk at Oregon State College. They lived in a walled tent, then cabin on an acre south of Corvallis. After David’s death Helen wanted another child. Keta Katharine was born 15 October 1949. Tava Helen followed 25 August 1951, but her arrival was recorded as 26 August because Good Samaritan Hospital was on daylight savings time. They built a small house. Gary got a bachelor’s degree. They both took pictures to get published with the stories Gary wrote articles for family outdoor magazines. He no longer worked for anyone else because he wanted to write fiction.

Helen became a secretary in the Oregon State College film library in the Department of Continuing Education for nine years. After three men, with college degrees, hired in succession for a newsletter position failed, the secretaries in the office demanded to take the state civil service test for the job, even though they did not have degrees. Helen placed first in the state. Another placed third. No one could deny their skill. Helen learned from the college print shop how to take a manuscript through all the production processes. She taught her daughters to sew, bake, iron, knit and slaughter chickens. They did the laundry and Helen cleaned the house. She encouraged them to join 4-H, a free agricultural youth organization. She paid for both her children’s college education.

Starting in 1955 the bohemian family drove to northwestern Mexico every other year in the spring, staying one month, using Helen’s saved vacation time. They did a lot of skin diving and camped on remote beaches. They all learned Spanish. They made new friends.

At 35 Helen started taking college night classes to complete her degree in marine biology and English. She discovered she needed only four-and-a-half hours of sleep each night. Elfriede Adams, her secretary at the time, still regards Helen as a mentor and friend 60 years later. Helen joined the college Sea Beavers free-diving club. Helen felt, at that age, she could do anything she wanted. The members have remained friends.

It was around this time that her marriage started to disintegrate. Gary became menacing and violent and would threaten to kill her and the family. Her good friend Richard Trojan was with her when she moved out of the small family home in 1970. He later arranged for her to stay with his mother in Fresno, California, in secret from all her friends and family. Helen changed her car license and subscribed to a postal drop address. She managed to pay for her daughters’ college education on her salary as a photographer for the Fresno school district.

After such an upheaval, she started looking at jobs overseas because her children were almost independent and she wanted adventure. Private companies only hired women as secretaries for overseas work, but she did not want to be a secretary again. She noticed jobs she could do, such as a college catalog writer, were available in East Africa. Moving back to Oregon while still hiding from Gary, she worked three jobs, commuting from Springfield to Eugene and Corvallis. Her husband and his girlfriend Anne Marie Hewitt had joined the Peace Corps and were in Mali. So she let Tava and her husband stay in Helen’s old home while they attended college. When Gary and his girlfriend returned unexpectedly, they threw Tava and her husband out of the house that night. Helen then filed for divorce. On 27 May 1972 Gary poured kerosene and gasoline in the house, sat in a rocking chair, set the house alight, and shot himself. Helen said she had ten years of great marriage, eight years when it was all right, and five years of pure hell. The divorce had not yet been granted so Helen was a widow.

Helen’s sister, Mary, and brother-in-law, Merrill Conitz, had worked in Kenya for UNESCO in the late 1960s and talked about the country in glowing terms. In November 1972, Helen boarded a plane with a passport in her maiden name, a tourist visa, and a one-way ticket to Nairobi, Kenya. She had very little money, but she had acquired the skills and experience that enabled her to earn a good living. For the first few months Helen worked for free, editing and producing various newsletters until her work permit was approved. Her outgoing personality and obvious competence soon made her a respected fixture in the local publishing scene. Helen met Mary Anne Fitzgerald, a journalist, her second day in Nairobi. Mary Anne found Helen an apartment at the Langata Club. They have been close friends ever since. By this time Helen’s daughter Tava, was a flight attendant. The airline’s family benefit enabled Helen to travel the world and visit family and friends in the United States at very little cost. Helen lived in Africa for 43 years but never talked about how she became a widow.

Helen worked as a science editor for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and for the Nairobi Polytechnic teaching science editing. While there she trained about half the science editors in eastern Africa. She also edited many medical and agricultural papers for journals in Tanzania, Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda. In 1986 she moved to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to work as the adviser to the Department of Information Services in the Institute of Agricultural Research. She returned to Kenya in 1993 and worked with the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), now called World Agroforestry, until 1997 when she reached retirement age. She co-edited the book Research with Farmers. Lessons from Ethiopia and co-authored the editing manual, Scientific Writing for Agricultural Research Scientists for the West Africa Rice Development Association, and the Glossary for Agroforestry for ICRAF. She set up a complete publishing department useful to researchers. After retiring from ICRAF, she continued to work freelance. Helen left an enduring legacy throughout much of Africa by training many young professionals to a world-class standard of science editing.

She met Paul Kamau, a Kenyan hotelier, early on and had a long-term relationship, sometimes off but mostly on. She loved him; he swindled her. The women in his family, Wambui Kamau and Wairimu Virginia Pfister, were a great support.

Helen was close friends with Cheryl Sonnichsen of Ventura, California, who came to Kenya as a teacher in the Peace Corps and stayed on to work in public health. In the early 1970s Cheryl taught English at the Narok Boys Secondary School, situated in the heart of the game-filled Maasai plains that have since become world renowned. Through Cheryl, Helen made many Maasai friends, driving long hours to visit their homes and attend traditional ceremonies, such as when boys become warriors. All too frequently her car broke down along the way or got stuck in the mud during the rainy season. None of this dampened her enthusiasm for yet another Maasai adventure. Helen ate her fair share of roasted goat and from time to time drank the blood of a recently slaughtered sheep until she renounced meat and became a vegetarian in 1983. She was particularly close to David Nepara ole Paswa, who was like a son to her, and David’s daughter Sanau. Helen put David through school and made it possible for him to get a degree in international relations at American University in Washington DC.

Helen made friends easily and was extremely loyal. Mary Anne Fitzgerald, Naomi Kipuri, Rachel Koigi, and Yony Waite were longstanding friends. She was also close to Tsedeke Abate, Linda Benvenuto, Steve and Karen Franzel, Margaret Kadidi, Christie Peacock, Heidi Hadija Ernst, Susan Carvalho, Sharad Shankardass, Worku and Abeba Sharew, and Zewgu and his wife.

She was unfailingly generous, putting her employee’s children through school and opening her doors to those who were without somewhere to sleep. She used her professional network to help further her friends’ careers. She travelled to interesting places as often as she could and took her grandchildren on safari to Kenya’s beaches and game parks. She loved Kenya, its people, its wildlife and landscape, and Nairobi’s cosmopolitan atmosphere. She loved the expatriate lifestyle.

Helen built a cottage in a corner of her Karen property and rented out the house. When Helen returned to Oregon in her mid-80s to live near her daughters and her granddaughters as Medicare did not cover her in Kenya, she sold it all to Rachel Koigi. Helen returned almost every year to be among her Kenyan, Ethiopian and expatriate friends. Rachel kept the cottage for Helen to return to. Her plans to return again were cut short when she died peacefully from Parkinson’s disease and old age 21 October 2022, surrounded by her loving family: Keta Tom, Vega Tom, Koa Tom, Tiana Michaud, and Kyla Tom and Mike Barton. She was 95 and a secular humanist.

[Please click on ‘memories’ to read and add testimonials.]

Send to someone

Share this obituary with others

https://everloved.com/life-of/helen-vanhouten/obituary/

Copy