The last time I saw Dave, just a couple weeks ago, sitting at the 19th Street Diner in Glenwood, he talked more about the renovations he had made to his garage-turned-bar than about solving the problems of the world.

He talked more about the secret joys of Grand Junction yard sales than about global poverty.

I always preferred those conversations, because they reassured me that Dave had a life outside his driving passion, which was saving the world.

“News of my death had been greatly exaggerated,” Dave joked. Another man with the same name in the same town had recently died, and the news prompted concern among the legion of people who cared about him that it had been he that died.

As fate would have it, Dave suffered a stroke just weeks after we talked. He died three days later, at the age of 75. But the legacy he left behind is vaster than most of us could hope for. And to be sure, he left behind a world made better because he walked on it.

Dave was a retired professor at Colorado Mountain College, where he taught sociology at the Spring Valley campus. At least he was supposed to teach sociology. Most of his courses seemed to end up teaching the same thing: the plight of the world’s poor and the unnecessary hunger they face.

It was Dave’s life mission. Sparked by a student’s interest the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, Dave started leading service trips to Nicaragua. He created a sister-city relationship with the little village of Teotecacinte, nestled on the Honduran border, where the fighting had been fierce. The trips lasted for more than a decade. Their reverberations lasted even longer.

Townspeople drink from the potable water system volunteers from here helped build. Students graduate from the high school that locals here helped construct and fund. Young people still graduate from high school and college on scholarships from former visitors.

The projects enacted by Dave’s Friendship City Exchange saved lives and changed lives. Dave can rest easy knowing that.

But the biggest impact he had was among the students he taught. Dave secretly whispered that the lives he was trying to change weren’t in Nicaragua. They weren’t in El Salvador, where he launched another project. They were here, among the college students who went down disaffected and came back deeply affected.

Many of the work projects the students took on could have been done by the villagers themselves, probably much more efficiently. But to open up a world to young people, there’s no other way to do it than to have them live side-by-side with the world’s poor and learn from them face-to-face.

It worked. I joined Dave on two trips to Nicaragua and one to El Salvador. The changes brought to the communities were nice, but the changes to the students were profound as their eyes opened to a world beyond suburbia.

“The first reaction from people at the start is, ‘I couldn’t live like this. There’s no curling irons. There’s no VCRs,’” Harmon once told me. “What you find is people who know how to celebrate life. To be joyous. Dance. Sing. It’s a lesson in values. That’s what I’m interested in.”

One student I went with to El Salvador discovered the people who work in the factories that make the clothes we wear. A woman in the house he stayed in, Yolanda, commuted each day to San Salvador for work at a clothing factory that barely paid the bills.

“From now on when I walk through Wal-Mart and see a pair of jeans, and see a tag that says ‘El Salvador,’ I’ll think of Yolanda,” he told me. “It will put a face on that tag. When I see ‘El Salvador,’ I’ll see her face.”

Many of Dave’s students have been inspired to take on global issues themselves. Measured by the impacts they have on the world, Dave’s contribution is enormous.

The last time I saw Dave, he was planning a reunion trip to Nicaragua next year. He wanted to round up as many people as he could find who had traveled with him to Teotecacinte and go back to the village that had become such an important part of his life.

It would be a great trip, but it wouldn’t be the same without him. For me, one of the joys of traveling to Nicaragua with Dave with sitting around the table at the Diablo Rojo bar, swapping local gossip, tales of Nicaragua’s war-torn past and strategies for a brighter tomorrow, washed down with generous quantities of Victoria beer.

Instead, I’ll tip back a glass of Flor de Caña rum and remember Dave not for what might have been, but for what never would have been at all without him.

Salud.