Hildegard Feldmann

Hildegard Feldmann (4 April 1936 Näfels - 9 September 1990 El Sande, Colombia ) was a Swiss nurse and Catholic lay missionary who was active in India and Colombia.

Life

She grew up in Näfels and decided to become a missionary as a teenager . After secondary school, she trained as a nurse at the Cantonal Hospital in Lucerne from 1956 to 1959, and as a midwife at the Cantonal Hospital in Zurich from 1961 to 1962. She became a member of the community of lay missionaries of Fribourg in 1961.

In 1963, Hildegard Feldmann joined the Barwani mission in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. She then ran the pharmacy in the neighboring commune of Chiklya, which consisted of 14 sometimes remote hamlets. She regularly visited the population to treat injuries and minor illnesses, conduct vaccination campaigns and take care of infants in particular. In 1982, she went to Bangladesh to continue her humanitarian work.

In 1983, Hildegard Feldmann was sent to Colombia, where she continued her humanitarian commitment to similar tasks. However, she had to face many obstacles: the civil war between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, political and social problems (endemic corruption), the failures of public health services, the proliferation of drugs and alcoholism, and high infant mortality. Despite these difficulties, she continued her humanitarian work in Bocas de Satinga, near the Pacific coast. In April 1990, she moved to the hamlet of El Sande, further inland, to provide assistance to peasant families.

On 9 September 1990,  Hildegard Feldmann was shot and killed in El Sande, in the department of Nariño, in a house while she was treating a sick person. Two other civilians were killed with her: a catechist, Ramon Rojas Erazo, and Nestor Hernando Garcia.