For Antoinette Mensah, mission isn’t just something she does. It’s what she was born into—quite literally. In 1962, when she was only five months old, she and her mother left Ghana to join her father, who was studying at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on a scholarship from the Society of African Missions (SMA).

The family settled in Milwaukee, where Antoinette’s  father became a public-school teacher and a permanent deacon in the Church. Through the Office for World Mission, he eventually spent three years as an instructor at Pedu Seminary in the Diocese of Cape Coast, Ghana.

She has lived life with her feet in two worlds: much of her family lives in Ghana but she was raised in the  United States. For the last seven years, Antoinette has been the director of World Mission Ministries: Office for World Mission/Society for the Propagation of Faith in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The office’s goal is to build greater compassion and solidarity through education; manage a sister parish in the Dominican Republic; coordinate immersion trips; promote life-long missioners; and support the archdiocese’s 35 parish twinning efforts in Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, Uganda, and Venezuela, to name a few.