Lorraine Eloise Gribbens was born to Emma and Lee Earl Gribbens in South Chicago in 1920. In 1958, at the age of 38, she arrived in Sarawak from the United States to assume the post of pharmacist at the newly opened Christ Hospital in the little town of Kapit. She was supposed to serve for three years there but she stayed for 18.

Christ Hospital was a Methodist hospital built in the middle valley of the Rajang River, the longest river in Sarawak at 365 miles. At the time, Kapit was similar to a hill station with two rows of shophouses and two primary schools. The population had very little education. 

Gribbens was sent by the Women’s Division of the Mission Board of the Methodist Church in the US. As a missionary, she not only acted as the pharmacist of the hospital but  was also like a mother to the many children she supported. Her heart was with the native Kayan and Iban children and she continued to send them money regularly and offer them encouragement even after she returned to the US.

Gribbens was known for her ability to motivate the young people she worked with. One such example was when she helped to organise a youth camp in Rumah Giman in Ulu Sarikei in 1968. She outwalked all the youths on the jungle trek and arrived at the longhouse in two hours while they took almost three hours. When she got there, she immediately started a makeshift kitchen and had dinner cooking on the wood stove.

As Florentina Woodford of Miri, Sarawak, former matron of the Methodist Primary School who was in Kapit at the same time as Lorraine Gribbens, said in an interview, “It was God who brought her (Gribbens) to Kapit by default. She herself did not know that she would be posted to Sarawak.”^[1] Florentina was in Kapit from 1958 to 1972 and Gribbens was the bridesmaid at her wedding to Eddy Woodford in December 1965. 

Gribbens’ early life was marked by tragedy. Her mother died of cancer when she was only eight years old. Nine months later, her father succumbed to heart problems. The uncle who was to adopt her died six months later, before he could do so. Gribbens moved from place to place, cared for by various relatives. She attended five grammar schools, including one in California, and Lake View High School in Chicago.

In 1938, at the age of 18, she started work as a proof-reader for US$8 a week and held the post for five years before moving on to another job at a wartime manufacturing plant. By working nights and going back to high school during the day as a mature student among teenagers, she managed to take up the science and mathematics courses that she had missed earlier.

Indeed, God had plans for her. When World War II ended, the plant that Gribbens worked at closed down. However, at the time, the University of Illinois at Chicago needed laboratory workers, and Gribbens’ life was changed forever. She served as a lab assistant in the blood bank and studied at the same time. Later, she enrolled as a fulltime student of pharmacy and, in 1953, received a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy. 

The dean of the college hired Gribbens as a research associate, preparing allergenic extracts for skin testing at the university’s pharmacy department. Gribbens loved her work but she felt that God was pushing her towards doing something else with her profession. She was inspired to work in the mission field, which is how she ended up heading to the distant island of Borneo in 1958. 

As she worked primarily with the native Ibans in her new job, Gribbens took it upon herself to study their language and also Mandarin for several months. She had planned to stay in Sarawak for only three years but did not leave until 1976, perhaps becoming the longest-serving American missionary there since fellow missionaries, the Hoovers. 

While on her first furlough back in the U.S. in 1964, Gribbens was commissioned as a missionary. She also began work on a master’s degree in Christian education at Scarritt College for Christian Workers in Nashville.

During Gribbens’ years in Sarawak, the Methodist Church built a modern hospital and developed a Community Health and Motivation Programme (Chempro), which played a key role in providing immunisations, teaching public health and helping prevent communicable diseases. The hospital is now operated by the Malaysian government with Chempro continuing to come under the church.

After leaving Sarawak, Gribbens went on to work in Fiji until 1978. The following year, she joined the Harlan Appalachian Regional Hospital in Harlan, Kentucky, as a staff pharmacist.

Though she retired in 1985 at the age of 65, Gribbens heard God’s call again and was soon on her way, albeit a little reluctantly, to another country where she would have to learn yet another language. She went as a volunteer to Hospital Lumiere in Haiti at the very time that its chief pharmacist developed cancer and had to return permanently to the US. His successor then left for the US on leave.

Gribbens took over from her but when Gribbens was ready to leave Haiti, the man who was supposed to replace her was killed in an automobile accident. This time, her two-year term stretched to 3¼ years. But, as Gribbens observed, “God knew when help would be needed, so there I was.” 

While in Haiti, Gribbens not only had to handle the pharmacy at the hospital but also one at a clinic some 25 miles away. Still, she managed to survive the five different governments that came and went while serving in that turbulent country.

After she returned home, the tireless Gribbens was very active in the Biltmore United Methodist Church as well as the United Methodist Women’s organisation at the local and district levels. As part of the Blue Ridge Braillers, she also helped schoolchildren in North Carolina by transcribing Braille lessons, books and skills tests that she had learned prior to going to Sarawak. She is the only woman whose autobiography was among the 13 featured in the book Remarkable Pharmacists (Blockstein, William L. and Granberg, C. Boyd (Editors), Remarkable Pharmacists. 1973) 

Gribbens spent her last eight years in a retirement home in Asheville, North Carolina, before passing away in 2009 at the age of 89.