Daphne Dunger, 87, Sioux Falls, completed her earthly journey and entered into the presence of her savior on Saturday morning, July 11, 2026, at Good Samaritan Village in Sioux Falls. Per her wish, her physical body is donated to the University of South Dakota.
A visitation will be held at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, July 22, 2026, at 18th Street Church, 2400 W. 18th St. in Sioux Falls, with a service following at 10:30 a.m. A livestream link will be provided on Tuesday before the service.
Daphne Dunger was born on June 22, 1939, in Ebolowa, French Cameroon, to George and Louise (Krack) Dunger, who were serving as missionaries at Warwar in the heart of the Cameroon Grassland in western Africa. Daphne was the first North American Baptist missionary child born in Cameroon. Her early years in the Ndu area were formative and “happy ones.” Her father’s illness necessitated the family’s return to the United States when she was 8. She attended grade school and high school in Connecticut, Rhode Island and South Dakota.
One of her early childhood memories was seeing a missionary nurse rub salve on the sore neck of a Cameroonian girl and realizing this was a way she could really serve Jesus. Daphne confessed her faith in Jesus through baptism as a seventh-grader. In 1965, while attending a missionary rally at the North American Baptist Triennial Conference in Waco, Texas, she committed her life to Jesus Christ with a renewed desire to return to her native Africa as a missionary nurse. Later that year she applied for missionary service with the North American Baptist Conference mission society. She prepared herself by earning her registered nurse degree and diploma from the Methodist Kahler School of Nursing in Rochester, Minn. (1960), and then earning a bachelor of science in nursing education at the University of Minnesota (1964). She was accepted by the Frontier Nursing Service Graduate School of Midwifery and also studied for a time at North American Baptist Seminary in Sioux Falls.
A commissioning service was held at Trinity Baptist Church in Sioux Falls on May 23, 1965, shortly before Daphne returned to Cameroon, the land of her birth. There she served as a nurse, a nursing instructor and organizer of the Life Abundant program, which took basic health care and the good news of the Gospel to very remote villages of the country. In 1995, Daphne was diagnosed with leukemia and returned to the United States for treatment.
In 2017, Daphne and sister Amaryliss (Amie), sold their house in Brandon and moved to an apartment in Sioux Falls. Amie died in January 2021, and Daphne’s declining health led to transitions to independent living and then to skilled nursing residence at Good Samaritan Village, where her needs were well cared for.
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