Dianne LaScotte of Blessed Sacrament in St. Paul, second from left, visits Denali National Park and Preserve in June 2017 during an immersion trip to the Diocese of Fairbanks and northern Alaska.

Dianne LaScotte of Blessed Sacrament in St. Paul, second from left, visits Denali National Park and Preserve in June 2017 during an immersion trip to the Diocese of Fairbanks and northern Alaska. COURTESY CENTER FOR MISSION

While on an immersion and service trip to the tiny, remote village of Galena, Alaska, Dianne LaScotte approached an older resident outside St. John Berchman church to thank her for sharing her life story at a parish event. The woman, an elder in the Athabascan Indian community to which most of the village’s 470 residents belong, responded with curiosity, “Why are you here?”

A little surprised by the question, LaScotte, 73, a member of Blessed Sacrament in St. Paul, told the woman that she, and nine others visiting the Diocese of Fairbanks through the Center for Mission, had come to their town to listen, learn, pray and share a meal with them.

The woman from Galena smiled and said “OK” with the same grace the missionaries had experienced from other village residents who expressed joy, welcome and resilience, LaScotte said.

“They were kind and welcoming,” she said of their encounters in 2017. “We were in their church, on their land, in their home. I would say that’s the charity.”

The woman’s question made LaScotte reflect on why she’s served as a lay missionary in several locations starting in the 1970s. “That’s a question that anybody could ask about anything about their own lives: ‘What am I here for? What is my witness about?’”

During their eight days in Alaska, LaScotte hoped that the group’s witness of presence and service benefited those they met, not only in Galena but in Fairbanks, where they talked with and served meals to the homeless at Immaculate Conception church’s soup kitchen, and at other parishes they visited by airplane in the more than 409,000-square-mile diocese.

LaScotte traveled to the diocese with the Center for Mission in part because of two radio stations. A Lebanese Christian radio station helped ease her feelings of isolation as she worked at a children’s zoo on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1970s and 1980s. She later started supporting a Catholic radio station in Nome, Alaska, that also reaches isolated Christians. And Nome’s location in the Fairbanks diocese sold her on making the Center for Mission’s trip.

During another Center for Mission trip to El Salvador in 2011, LaScotte said she was radically affected by people she saw and met who suffered from deep poverty and gang violence.

She met Alaskans who live very simply, including Galena residents who depend on fish they catch in the nearby Yukon River. LaScotte also saw spiritual poverty as some Catholics in remote parishes only see a priest every three months. “We live in luxury, and we don’t know it here,” she said.

Experiencing how others live has made LaScotte think about her own consumption and contribution to her community.

“You listen and you hear the stories of the people, whether they’re serving like missionaries or they’re people who actually live there, and you learn their faith stories,” she said. “You see their small communities and what they can do … and how important each member of the community is and that makes a person who comes from a larger country rethink, ‘What am I doing? If they can do so much with so little, what am I doing?’”

After the limited time LaScotte has spent with Alaskans and others she’s met on mission trips, she said she’s tried to plant seeds of faith for others to nurture.

“I think it has to start with how you are and what you’re called to be in the small things in your own life — and one experience led to another, which led to another,” she said.