Carol Trachsel
“Each person needs to get their personal directions from God,” Carol says. “I had decided when in high school that I didn’t want to be a missionary. But when I made a full surrender to Christ in my senior year, it included being a missionary if that was what God wanted. He changed my desires, and a couple of years later He said very clearly to me, ‘Yes, I want you to be a missionary.’”
Carol was born in Salem, Oregon, on Christmas Eve in 1941. At the time, her father was in China, where he had been detained and later placed in an internment camp. Carol didn’t meet him until she was almost 2. At the age of 5, she moved to Chungking, China, with her mother and two sisters, Helen and Joy, where they met her father who had gone ahead of them.
In high school, Carol had some emotional ups and downs regarding her faith, but she recommitted to Christianity while attending Mt. Carmel High School in Kentucky. Despite her former adamancy that she wasn’t going to be a missionary, she gradually became open to the idea of doing missions work. Carol received her definite call while training to be a medical technologist after studying at Marion College, now Indiana Wesleyan University. While attending the WGM National Convention in 1961, she responded to the challenge to consider missions by asking God if it was His will for her life.
Carol retired in 2007 after 41 years of missionary service, but she still visits Kenya regularly, where she has recently been leading a Bible quizzing team of young students and helping out at Tenwek School of Nursing. She has also been able to make trips to her “home” country of China.