Through Mennonite Voluntary Service (MVS), Juan Witmer found much more than he bargained for in Tucson, Arizona. In the span of a year, he encountered a welcoming faith community, vibrant southwest landscapes, and a placement he intends to make into a career. MVS is a program of Mennonite Mission Network. Applications for the 2027-28 service term are now open! Click here to apply.
NEWTON, Kansas (Mennonite Mission Network) – When Juan Witmer stepped off the plane in Tucson, Arizona, last August, anxiety hit him as hard as the desert heat.
A lifelong Philadelphia resident, Witmer found Tucson comparatively small, relentlessly hot, and surrounded by empty desert. His home improvement background began and ended at hanging a picture frame. Now he was expected to repair evaporative coolers, snake drains and build wheelchair ramps from scratch in a few days.
“What did I sign up for?” he recalled asking himself.
One year later, at the end of his Mennonite Voluntary Service (MVS) term that brought him to Tucson, Witmer’s perspective had shifted. The desert around him was, in fact, full of weird, wild and wonderful life. He had grown to like the heat. And the small-town feeling of the city was beginning to feel like home. Instead of returning east, he chose to stay in Tucson and pursue a full-time career as a plumber.
“I really fell in love with being here,” Witmer said in a recent interview.
From pipedream to potential career
Witmer’s service placement in MVS was with CHRPA (Community Home Repair Projects of Arizona). The local non-profit provides emergency home repairs and accessibility modifications for low-income homeowners and people with disabilities. It was there that Witmer encountered everything that plumbing could entail: clogged drains, backed up toilets and corroded pipes. To his surprise, he loved it.
A photography major in college, Witmer described an unexpected parallel between taking a photo and fixing a leaky pipe – seeing the immediate results of your work. In photography, “you’re going to be either underexposed, overexposed, or just perfectly exposed,” he explained. “The same thing with plumbing. Either nothing’s leaking or water is spilling out. You get live results.”
Beyond the immediate gratification of a job well done, Witmer found his placement meaningful on a spiritual level, too. “I love the whole concept of CHRPA, of helping people in need who otherwise can’t afford it.”
“If I call myself Mennonite, how can I be more like Jesus?” he reflected. “This [work] is a Jesus action here. Providing care for people and giving them the repairs they need…it’s just a big joy to me to see that [CHRPA] can provide that for people.”
Embracing unexpected community
In addition to volunteer placements with local organizations, a big part of the MVS experience is living in community with housemates in a unit house. When Witmer’s two original housemates left the unit house early for different commitments, he found out he would soon have another housemate – Derrell Ness, a retiree serving with Mission Network’s SOOP (Service Opportunities with Our Partners) program.
Like MVS, SOOP participants join with local organizations across the country through voluntary service. Unlike MVS, SOOP offers flexible terms — from two weeks to a year — and welcomes individuals, couples and families. Some SOOP sites have lodging available, while others accommodate RVs or homestays. In Tucson, most SOOPers live in RVs on the property of Shalom Mennonite Fellowship church, where the MVS house and CHRPA offices are also located.
For Ness, whose previous volunteer position at a camp was cut short due to catastrophic flooding, leaving the Pacific Northwest to travelto Arizona felt like a leap of faith. Knowing he’d have lodging at the MVS house made the move possible.
“[Juan and I] hit it off immediately when I got there,” recalled Ness. “It took five minutes of the Mennonite game to know that I knew his parents and his aunts and uncles and his grandparents because, of course!”
That same evening, Ness was introduced to the other SOOP volunteers, who were having supper in the church building. They invited him to sit down and eat. “I was just part of the group within ten minutes after I got out of my car,” he said.
Ness and Witmer usually crossed paths with each other in the evening, after their service placements wrapped up for the day. They cooked independently, but frequently joined the SOOPers for potlucks, game nights, and other activities. Some nights after supper, they’d both stay at the dinner table, swapping stories over ice cream.
Ness recalled that he and Witmer established early on that his role coming into the house wasn’t as a parental figure, or a peer, but to provide, “above anything else, just a listening ear.”
Passing along intergenerational friendship
Ness knew how important a listening ear could be. In 2018, his youngest son participated in Service Adventure, another voluntary service program of Mission Network. That experience “changed his life,” said Ness, thanks in no small part to the family in the supporting congregation that helped his son feel at home in a new place.
“One of the things [the Anabaptist] church models so well is intergenerational friendships and relationships,” he said. “I signed up to be a SOOP volunteer and I got a lot more than I signed up for. And I mean that in the best possible way.”
“He’s been great,” said Witmer. “Both of us have grown to love the city, and we love different parts of it. To learn and reflect on that with somebody else, is just beautiful to me.”
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