Val Papple, St. Albert, Alberta, (right) gives MDS client Connie Carlberg a prayer shawl at her home dedication service in Walton County, Fla. Papple, MDS volunteer, made the shawl just before arriving in Florida to volunteer with MDS.

Doing her best to hold back a flood of tears, Arlene Friesen turned to Connie Carlberg who was seated on the couch of her newly repaired living room and said, “When we got here a couple of weeks ago we heard about this widow that needed help on her house. We came here and there was a smile that greeted us right away and you just lit up the room wherever you went. And you just walked into our hearts the first day.”

Arriving in early January as part of a Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) RV team in Pensacola, Fla., Friesen along with her husband and three other couples, began working alongside Carlberg to complete repair work on her home which had been severely damaged by flooding in 2014 and earlier.

By the last week of January, Carlberg and the MDS team were having a house dedication, celebrating a new day for her home.

For Carlberg it was the end of a two-year ordeal which came after the death of her husband. Her home was flooded not once but twice.

She single-handedly dug a retention pond behind her home, then spent hours, days, sometimes all night, firing up pump after pump to move the water on.

Each time she found a way to get the water out, another storm brought it back. At one point 24 inches of rain fell in 24 days.

In the end, despite her own best efforts, which by any measure were incredible for one person, Carlberg found support and funding with local Catholic Conference and Methodist teams from Pensacola who helped her clean-up and ultimately raise her home four feet above the flood level.

With the home securely resting on a multitude of pylons high above the reach of the next rain, a group of MDS volunteers living out of their RVs came from as far north as Manitoba to rebuild walls, install electric and lighting, paint, construct stairs and an outdoor deck and finally make this place her home again.

The Feb. 2 house dedication was a moment for saying the job was done and thanking God and acknowledging that Carlberg can now move forward.

It was also a moment for Carlberg to recognize the journey she had been on the past few years, sometimes completely alone, and say how much the experience brought new hope to her life.

Turning to the MDS volunteers she said, “You have changed my life, more than you changed this house.”