Sixty-eight trucks?! Fifty-one cargo trailers?! And that’s only a small part of the Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) fleet, which collectively clocks more than 600,000 miles to respond to disasters in a single year. Who keeps all those...
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Every morning on his way to work, contractor Ken Hollinger passed a black space. He knew two area homes recently burned. Between cancer treatments and work, however, there was never enough time. Besides, he and Suetta, his wife, had a spring...
“If I never come back here again, it’s going to be too soon.” Peter Goertzen, who has volunteered at more than 26 different MDS sites, remembers uttering these words back in 2007—the first time he ever served as a long-term volunteer in the...
Shirley Smith, 83, waits every day to hear the singing. From her living room, where she sits and cares for her 101-year-old husband, Joe Smith, she hears the sounds of MDS volunteers who are repairing their home in Selma, Alabama: hammering, sawing...
Closing down the longstanding MDS response in Jennings, Louisiana, wasn’t easy. MDS Project Director Rollin Ulrich had the tough job—both logistically and emotionally—of moving MDS volunteers and equipment out of the Jennings Church of Christ...
Pastor John Grayson lost an argument with God. He really didn’t think he had time to open a shelter to offer unhoused people a hot meal and a warm bed. Wasn’t his church—the Gospel Tabernacle Chapel—doing enough? “The Lord won the argument...
The wall of signatures and blessings. Freida Platt’s cooking. Meals, jokes, and prayers with Pastor Roy Platt, at the Jennings Church of Christ. All the ways the church and the whole community of Jennings, Louisiana, opened their hearts to MDS...
Airplanes swooping down low over the cotton fields of Alabama. That’s one of Doris Hale’s first memories as a little girl. “I was born November 30, 1965,” she said. “My mother worked in the fields, and we stayed on people’s places.”...
Phil Helmuth was beating the bushes to find a reasonably-priced electrician. It was early 2023, when MDS was rebuilding and repairing homes in the wake of hurricanes Laura and Delta in southwest Louisiana, Helmuth, an MDS project coordinator,...
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