Dorothy Jean Bare

Dorothy Jean Dyson was born January 16, 1927, in Chandlerville, Illinois, the third of nine children born to Ernest Dyson and Ruby Newingham Dyson. Dorothy is survived by three loving children; 5 grandchildren; 13 great-grandchildren; 1 brother; many nieces, nephews, other relatives and friends.

A visitation for Dorothy will be held Tuesday, March 8, 2022 from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM at Lincoln Memorial Funeral Home, 6800 S 14th St., Lincoln, NE 68512. A memorial celebration of life service will occur Wednesday, March 9, 2022 at 10:00 AM at Lincoln Memorial Funeral Home. The family wishes memorials to Hands of Compassion care of Wildwood Christian Church. 1255 Royal dr. Papillion, NE 68046.

Dorothy grew up in Depression-era small town Illinois. Dorothy’s father, Ernest operated a grocery store. Although he provided the essentials for his large family, his generosity and willingness to carry hard-up people on credit ensured that there was not a big profit margin. Dorothy and her siblings grew up in a white two-story house with a big front porch, set on a hillside.

Dorothy loved to read and was an avid reader all her life. She learned to play the piano. She attended Sunday school at the Congregational Church. She heard missionary stories and thought she might like to be a missionary, although she wasn’t quite sure what a missionary was or did. As Dorothy got older, she set her sights on being a teacher. She attended Culver-Stockton College.

Dorothy’s first teaching assignment was at a one-room country school. The next year she taught third and fourth grades at Chandlerville Elementary School and one of her fourth-grade students was her own brother Sam.

Dorothy transferred to Lincoln Bible Institute. There she attracted the attention of a young underclassman named Garland Bare, who was determined to see if he could get her serious demeanor to crack a smile. He would have to wait in line. The smart, pretty girl with the sweet soprano voice had a lot of young preacher boys thinking she would make a great ministry partner. But the partnership God had in mind and brought about was Garland and Dorothy.

After they were engaged Dorothy spent a summer ministering to the Yakima Nation in Toppenish, Washington.

Dorothy and Garland were married January 13, 1951. Their home always filled with an assortment of guests. Over the years hundreds of people would spend anywhere from a single night to several years in the Bares’ home: traveling missionaries and evangelists; refugees from Tibet, Burma, and Laos; a French Foreign Legionnaire; assorted anthropologists, botanists, ornithologists, and sundry adventurers and adventuresses; U.S. diplomatic and military personnel; a British student; numerous hill tribes people; college students, and others.

In the summer of 1951 Garland and Dorothy set out for Thailand. They booked passage on a freighter that had accommodations for a handful of passengers. The passed through the Panama Canal and crossed the Pacific Ocean. To pass the weeks profitably Dorothy taught Garland French and he taught her Mandarin.

Dorothy and Garland went to Chiang Kam in Chiang Rai Province in northern Thailand. There they would study the Thai language while also learning from missionaries on the field. In those days in that part of Thailand there was no electricity, no running water, no commercial manufacturing, no telecommunication. There were no proper roads either.

After two years Garland and Dorothy moved to the town of Pua in Nan Province. There they would begin a work among the Hmong people who lived in the mountains surrounding Pua and would caravan into town to trade. The Bares would also work with some existing churches that had been planted in nearby villages by Presbyterian missionaries, and Garland would also evangelize in the Thai and Khamu villages.

It was while Dorothy and Garland were in Pua that their three children, a son and two daughters, were born. But the children were not born in Pua where there were no medical facilities. Instead, about a month before each child was due, the Bares would travel to Phrae, the capital of a neighboring province, where the Presbyterian mission had a hospital. Under the best of conditions, the trip was more than a day. During the rainy season, when the girls were born, it could be three days or more.

While raising her own children Dorothy taught the local mothers principles of nutrition and hygiene that would improve the health and survivability of both mothers and children in the community.

Dorothy was always a teacher. She used visual aids, including flannelgraph, to teach Bible stories to local youngsters in her living room. Her flannelgraph backgrounds and many of the figures were ones she made herself.

She read to her own children from the time they were infants, by the light of kerosene lamps. As far back as the children could remember the nightly readings included Bible stories followed by questions.

Dorothy homeschooled her children in their earliest years. She loved to use visual aids and taught them phonics. Introducing them to The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and the works of Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Shakespeare, Louisa May Alcott, and others. Family Bible reading, songs, and prayers would continue for as long as the children were home.

When Hmong children came to live with the Bares so that they could attend government schools, Dorothy found plenty of opportunities to help tutor them with their lessons.

In 1964 the Bares moved to Chiang Mai, the largest city in the North, so that Garland could attend medical school. God provided a home next door to an English-language school operated under the auspices of the Presbyterian mission. The Bare children would attend school there for the next five years, and to pay their tuition, Dorothy would teach whenever needed—first grade, fourth grade, seventh and eighth grade English. Although the classes were in English, the student body included not only British, American, and Canadian children but also German, Danish, Finnish, and Korean children. The faculty and staff were equally diverse.

Dorothy also taught piano lessons. Music was always a part of life with Dorothy. She and Garland would sing duets. They both played the piano, pump organ and accordion. Dorothy taught her children the standard Sunday school songs, and the family sang hymns as part of family devotions. She played music for her children on a hand-cranked phonograph (later replaced by a battery-powered one). When she could, she sang in community and church choirs. As she went about her chores she whistled and sang.

In 1974 the Bares returned to the United States, settling in Lincoln, Nebraska. Dorothy pursued graduate studies at the University of Nebraska, helped to care for Garland’s parents, continued to be Mom to her youngest daughter and some foster children, hosted an endless stream of college students in her home, was active in the local church and continued to teach. She taught Sunday school in the church, and she taught English language and literacy to refugee immigrants from all over the world, but mostly from Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and Southeast Asia. Garland and Dorothy were active members of Douglas Street Church of Christ and Capitol City Christian Church while they lived in Lincoln. Dorothy also spoke to women’s groups on various occasions.

For a few years Dorothy would return to homeschooling, teaching three of her grandchildren. Dorothy was a loving grandmother, helping raise her grandson, Rodney, as well as traveling with Garland, their grandchildren, and a great-nephew and great-niece on several camping trips to various interesting and educational places.

Garland and Dorothy opened their home to their children and grandchildren throughout the years. Much of their time in Lincoln was spent in a three-generation household. They continued the tradition of family devotions, reading the Bible, singing hymns, and telling the tales of the adventures in Thailand as their grandchildren sat in wonder of the work God did there.

In 2008 Dorothy and Garland retired to Spring River Christian Village in Joplin, Missouri. Their youngest daughter accompanied them there. Dorothy was active in the retirement community, volunteering in the dining hall for several years, singing in the choir, singing special numbers with Garland and their daughter, taking classes, and doing Zumba exercise. She enjoyed attending concerts, sporting events, and other activities in which her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were involved.

Many people have heard of Garland Bare. It must be remembered that Garland and Dorothy were a team, a lifelong partnership. Through long seasons of loneliness on a remote mission field, when communication was slow and contacts with supporters and loved ones were few and far between, when she had to “hold the fort” alone while Garland was taking the Gospel to even more remote mountain villages or going to medical school, amid threats from hostile people, when tropical diseases nearly took the lives of various members of the family, it was through Dorothy’s steadiness, her faith and faithfulness, her bulldog tenacity--that the grace and faithfulness of God that sustained the Bare family was so often manifested. Dorothy is Garland’s emotional center and the love of his life.

After Garland’s death in 2017, Dorothy stayed in Joplin for two years before moving to Omaha in 2019, where she became an enjoyable addition to the four-generation household with the Wilsons and Parracks. She became an active member of Wildewood Christian Church. Dorothy peacefully transitioned into eternal life, in her four-generation home, surrounded by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.