Pivotal

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 student who told me New Orleans had no system for evacuating residents without cars and wasn’t designed to withstand a category IV hurricane. Having that background, Katrina felt much more like a disaster of neglect and disregard than an unavoidable natural disaster. I wanted to be a part of responding to that in a compassionate way.”

He volunteered with the Red Cross at Houston’s Astrodome. David said, “To see folks in the level of desperation that they were in really added specificity to my desire to do some sort of volunteer work before beginning a career.”

David continued, “I wanted to seek out a way to respond to what I saw in Houston. I grew up in the Mennonite church in Goshen, Indiana. In high school, I had done a father and son volunteer trip, so I was aware of MDS. I contacted them.”

After completing his work commitment in banking, David went to Pass Christian, Mississippi, in 2006 to assist in the rebuilding phase. “I didn’t have any serious construction experience before MDS,” David said.

“I had always wanted to be in New Orleans with MDS,” David added. “I was part of the first group that moved into Holy Family Convent on Gentilly.  We converted a building on Hayne Boulevard from an engineering firm into space for MDS volunteer housing and the local operations center for MDS.”

David said that one of the benefits of long term MDS service was meeting Mennonites from all over North America. “I think it gave me a much broader understanding of the Mennonite Church than I had growing up in Goshen.”

His time in New Orleans also gave David a sense of purpose. “It was easy to feel like you were contributing to the needs of the community. It was very rewarding. It really felt like a collective community effort. It gave me the feeling of being part of something positive.”

“That experience changed the trajectory of my life,” David continued. “It has been pivotal in all my choices and experiences since. It is hard to imagine, with how little I knew when I plugged into MDS, what I was able to do by the end of that time.”

After ten months as an MDS crew leader, David joined Catholic Charities, one of the MDS local casework partners. “I connected with Catholic Charities through MDS. I was on staff there for three and a half years. My work at Catholic Charities became my transition into the affordable housing space.”

“Those early years in New Orleans had an enormous impact on my personal life,” David said. “I met my wife, Sara Johansen, while we were both volunteering at Catholic Charities. I feel like the folks I met in New Orleans are still some of my closest friends.”

David’s work with MDS gave him construction and management skills he has used in every job since Katrina. For five years David was self-employed as a carpenter. With Catholic Charities he was project manager for the complicated Chinese drywall remediation. For the past ten years David has been in real estate development, focused on affordable housing. Currently David works nationally as an affordable housing consultant.

One of David’s career highlights was developing the first FORTIFIED Multifamily Gold community in the nation, in Lockport, Louisiana. The FORTIFIED program is an above-code building certification designed to recognize homes with better resistance to natural disasters. When Les Maisons de Bayou Lafourche was about 85 percent complete, it sustained a direct hit from category IV Hurricane Ida with minimal damage. David reflected, “The success of that project was really a product of the pathway that I took into the affordable rental housing industry. I would not have had the same perspective on how to approach that development without the experiences that began at MDS 15 years earlier.”

New Orleans is still home for David and Sara. They recently sold the home they owned there for over 10 years to move down to the French Quarter.

Elaine Maust is a writer, spiritual director and retired pastor.  A transplant from Mississippi, Elaine now lives with her husband, Duane, in Michigan’s Thumb.