When a family member of one of Sister Connie Krautkremer’s students asked to wash her feet when she visited their Tanzanian village in 1970, the Maryknoll religious sister didn’t want her to go through the trouble.

The girl insisted. Since the family had no faucet, she brought the water from an outside source and heated it over a fire.

“She washed my feet in this warm water, and I was the recipient of this beautiful gesture of hospitality,” recalled Sister Connie, who grew up on a farm in Montgomery, about an hour south of the Twin Cities, and has spent many of her almost 60 years as a Maryknoll sister serving in Tanzania.

More than two decades after having her own feet washed, Sister Connie said, she was rubbing a Tanzanian AIDS patient’s feet when visitors commented on her love. She pointed out that as a missionary she had given but also received from others.

“I came to Tanzania and somebody washed my feet,” she said. “Don’t give me credit for being the only one who knows how to look.”

Reflecting on her ministry in Tanzania between 1969 and 2015, Sister Connie said she admired Tanzanians for their simplicity of life and culture.

She worked with youth, but mainly taught and helped Tanzanian women and girls gain empowerment and self-awareness, and she accompanied those discerning a call to join her community. Sister Connie also has served with her congregation’s leadership and administration, alternating with her Tanzanian service and exclusively now that she’s no longer serving in Africa.

Sister Connie was born in New Prague in 1943. Benedictine sisters taught at her grade school, Most Holy Redeemer Catholic School in Montgomery. “My vocation story started there because of my second-grade teacher and I wanted to be just like her,” she said.

In middle school, Sister Connie enjoyed learning about geography and people of other nations. A few years later, at a high school retreat in St. Paul, she felt an intense call to become a missionary sister.

While studying biology at then-College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Sister Connie researched Maryknoll and learned about Tanzania from Tanzanian students.

“I was in the dormitory with one (student) and I just liked her so much I thought if I ever become a Maryknoll sister and I ever have a chance to ask where I want to go, I’m going to say Tanzania,” she said.

After graduating in 1965, she entered the congregation at the Maryknoll Sisters Novitiate in Valley Park, Missouri, and four years later Sister Connie got her wish: She was sent to Tanzania. Sister Connie’s family supported her vocation but were apprehensive about her serving in the distant country, she said.

Following her first assignment teaching biology and other subjects in a rural high school for girls, Sister Connie helped young people moving from rural areas to the city to settle and find jobs.

Returning to the United States in the mid-1980s, Sister Connie directed the Maryknoll Mission Institute, which looked at theology developed in different parts of the world. In 1991, she earned a master’s degree in Culture/Creation Spirituality.

When she went back to Tanzania in the early 1990s, she helped women suffering from HIV/AIDS as the virus ravaged the country. Sister Connie began working more directly with women and girls, helping them to be empowered and protect themselves from sexual and other forms of harassment. She also incorporated knowledge from her graduate studies into lessons on religion and care of the earth.

The Tanzanian women’s groups that Sister Connie founded were so successful that participants began taking over the leadership, she said. “Some of my students who were such rascals in my biology classes were now setting up a center for women who are abused,” she said. As she readied to leave Tanzania, she said, “part of the reason for going, besides my age, was that I really felt like I had worked myself out of a job.”

Apart from working in Tanzania, Sister Connie said she visited many mission sites around the world where Maryknoll sisters serve while on her congregation’s leadership team. She currently assists its roughly 280 sisters at those sites as personnel director. She sees hope for her congregation in the ideas and energy of younger sisters.

“Our leadership team now is a younger group of women so they have ideas and plans and take risks for what we could do, (such as) ‘we might try this or we might try that,’ so I find hope in all of that.”

Sister Connie turns 80 in December but won’t consider retirement until her term as personnel director ends in two years.

Reflecting on her ministry, Sister Connie said that rather than bringing knowledge into the country, she found more often she was helping connect Tanzanians with what they already knew from their cultures, villages and families.

Working with people of different faiths has broadened her own view of the world and faith, she said. “I think part of it for me is awareness of how people in different parts of the world do things, care for one another and express their faith.”