Nine-year-old Owen Nichols cut the ribbon on a new bridge in Iron Station, North Carolina on June 29, officially dedicating the state’s first bridge built by Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) volunteers, who spent about eight days working on the...
MDS is widely known as a disaster relief organization that is there for communities over the long haul. The organization’s response in Lytton, British Columbia, is a prime example. The village of approximately 250 people was flattened by an extreme...
“Things like this don’t happen to me,” said Wayne Roden, 66, with the frame of his new house and hum of a volunteer team in the background. Roden lost his home to the Bush Creek East Wildfire in August of last year. A resident of Scotch Creek,...
Three hundred people gathered on June 9 in Goessel, Kansas to celebrate the dedication of the Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) cabinet shop and a new warehouse for storing materials. They toured the site, and many of them also experienced a...
Twenty-nine families in Iron Station, North Carolina, are sleeping better at night. And their daytimes got better, too, after Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) volunteers constructed a new 60-foot bridge to carry them in and out of their beloved...
Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) volunteers visited Kykotsmovi Village on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, and helped repair extensive water damage at the Peace Academic Center. After a November 2023 freeze, Lance Polingyouma, superintendent of...
“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...
Her first time volunteering, she stayed five weeks. Hannah Grace Steffen, 23, recalled when her grandmother heard about MDS from a friend—and then her grandmother decided she’d like to cook for volunteers. “But that would have involved...
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...
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