As they climbed a 205-step wooden trail staircase on Mackinaw Island, Twila and Leonard Hochstedler talked about why they love the Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) RV Program. The both have a sense of adventure. From Kalona, Iowa, the couple has been...
By Elaine Maust As Hurricane Katrina approached, Blanca Mackay and her husband, Mario, left New Orleans for Houston, Texas. “We took one of our cars and followed our son and his wife,” Blanca remembered. “We stayed in Houston almost a month....
By Elaine Maust David Harms lived in Houston, Texas, during his first year after college, working in investment banking. From Houston he watched Katrina bear down in the Gulf. “A few years before Katrina,” David said, “I met a Tulane...
Sometimes, Alicia Hertzler looks back at her journal entries from 2005, when she helped Hurricane Katrina survivors. Today we toured New Orleans and some parts of it are just ruined. There are piles of debris outside every house and some of the...
The fire destroyed our home on November 17, 2024,” Aleeshia Haskell said. “Only three years after we bought the place. That house was a catastrophe when we got it. We completely rebuilt it. We did the work. I did the plumbing, and my husband did...
When Aysia Adkins, a rising senior at Goshen College, found herself on a Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) site, it changed her life. She traveled with other students from the college to Selma, Alabama, where the group not only helped rebuild...
After a mile-wide tornado tore through southern Kentucky on May 16, Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) volunteers from Ohio are engaged in early response, removing damaged trees and debris in the London and Somerset communities. MDS Regional...
During the Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) Annual Celebration in Wichita, Kansas, two yearlong MDS volunteers, Jonathon Shirk Snyder and Katie Snyder shared their perspectives on how young people view service—and why, more than ever, how it adds...
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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