WARREN, Ind. (Mennonite Mission Network) — Janet Soldner Nussbaum, one of the first Mennonite missionaries to Colombia, died Thursday, April 9, 2009, at Heritage Pointe in Warren, Ind., at the age of 90. She served in Colombia for more than three decades, then spent four years in Mexico with Commission on Overseas Mission, a predecessor agency of Mennonite Mission Network.

Soldner Nussbaum, along with three other COM workers, traveled to Colombia in 1945 to begin a ministry on an 8-acre farm near Cachipay, a small town on the eastern range of the Colombian Andes. This team began work in Colombia the same year a Mennonite Brethren team arrived in the community of Palmira.

Out of the Cachipay ministry grew Iglesia Cristiana Menonita de Colombia (Colombia Mennonite Church), as well as a clinic and an elementary boarding school. Soldner Nussbaum served in both the clinic and the school.

Her students remember Soldner Nussbaum fondly as a music teacher with great talent on the piano and as a nurse who cared deeply about their health.

“It was from her that we received the first ‘terrible’ vaccinations and the first lessons of hygiene,” said GuillermoVargas Rincón, a former student who is now the director of Colegio Americano Menno, a high school in near-by La Mesa. “For alumni of the school in Cachipay, her life was one of inspiration and discipline. For our family, she was one sent from God to give support, comfort and love.”

Soldner Nussbaum also taught adult literacy in the Cachipay congregation.

Vernelle Yoder, who served with Soldner Nussbaum in Colombia, said her friend cared both for others' physical and spiritual well-being, dealing with aches and pains, quick-spreading childhood epidemics, and the homesickness and emotional needs among the children in school dormitories.

Soldner Nussbaum was born on November 7, 1918, to Clinton D. and Gertrude (Lehman) Soldner. She married Tillman L. Nussbaum after her return from Mexico in 1976. She was a member of First Mennonite Church in Berne, Ind. and graduated from Bethel Deaconess Hospital in Newton, Kan. in 1942 with a nursing degree.

She is survived by one sister, Treva Schaffter of Geneva. She was preceded in death by her parents and her husband.

Soldner Nussbaum was buried in Spring Hill Cemetery in Warren.