Menno Shellenberger †

Menno J. Shellenberger was born in Osborne County, Kansas, on 6 January 1897 and joined the Mennonite Church at about seventeen. He spent five years at Hesston College and was president of its Young People's Christian Association when he left Kansas for the Near East in August 1921. He was one of thirty-one Mennonites who served with Near East Relief, sent through the Mennonite Relief Commission for War Sufferers, which had agreed in January 1919 to work alongside the organization rather than mount a separate effort.

He drove supply trucks between Aleppo and Diarbekir (Diyarbakır), the road that fed the relief stations in the Turkish interior. Less than three months after he reached the field, he caught smallpox from refugees at Diarbekr. Several physicians and a trained nurse attended him. He was ill for nearly three weeks and died on 14 December 1921, aged twenty-four.

Jakob Künzler, the Swiss missionary physician, buried him the next morning on the bank of the Tigris. The cable reached his family at Hesston on 6 January 1922. Hesston College held a memorial service for him in its assembly hall on 12 February.