Kimberly is an Apparel design major at Appalachian State University. She was at back home when the hurricane hit, but the day before she left she had a strange dream her dorm room flooded. On September 26, it came true. But instead of the risings waters bringing forth fear like in her dream, Helene revealed an unbreakable and selfless community to Kimberly she choose to model her quilt square after.
"So my square is about the concepts of multiple approaches to community efforts in rebuilding, coming into one and bringing together the broken pieces as well as adding new pieces through different collaborative approaches. This forms a new union, which would be a more resilient community. So that's where you see the different types of threads, the safety pins, just very different forms of media.
I definitely feel like during the hurricane there were a lot of different organizations, but they all worked together in healing the community. The lines, I kind of wanted to capture the water, the land. There's some drops right here that I need to put on, but they would symbolize the rain, the clouds. So it would be more of an abstract view.
So do you have some sewing experience from your major?
Yeah, I'm an apparel design major. So this is right up my alley. I wouldn't say I'm the best at sewing, but I do love a good concept. So this is kind of what my square is, threading communities together.
The thing is, as we're seeing with this project, clothing and textiles, they send the message of culture and people. And so even here, forming this quilt, there's so many different stories and perspectives coming together into showing the overarching idea.
It’s just taking into account and highlighting different stories, different experiences, but the one uniter, Helene, and what came out of that.
Were you up here during the hurricane?
So it was actually really interesting because my best friend and my cousin got married on that weekend [of Helene] and so I had been packing and planning to go back home.
But I remember having this really weird dream that my dorm was flooded, and I remember waking up, and I was like, that's so weird, and it was thunder storming outside. I have always been very afraid of thunderstorms. So I messaged my roommate, she works the night shift at the hospital here, and I was like, hey, I had this super weird dream, but she was like, dude, it's fine.
I always have weird dreams. So I was like, OK, whatever. So I head back home, and then, literally, I am at my best friend's bachelorette, and then my roommate sends me a message, saying our dorm was flooded, and I was like, no way. And so she was sending me messages and pictures, and I was trying to get in touch with my friends back trying to make sure they were OK, and if there was anything they needed. But I live four hours away from here, so it kind of was a very desperate feeling of wanting to be here and wanting to be of use, but there's so much distance, and I did not having the ability to come back safely.
Back at East Carolina were I live, there were a lot of community efforts to help, and there were a lot of drop-off zones for materials, like food. So I would volunteer at those, and then when I got back to Boone, I ended up volunteering for the Immigrant Justice Coalition. We were going around and asking immigration-impacted folks in the community what things they needed. And there was this one family in particular that really stuck with me. The husband worked construction, but of course, those are one of the industries that are directly impacted by natural disasters. He didn't have a job, and so he was volunteering with Samaritan's Purse on the daily. Their son had a lung problem, so he needed to be hooked up at all times to a machine. And so when they didn't have any electricity, they had to hook up his machine to the car battery. And so she [the wife] was like, "Honestly, we're doing OK. Samaritan's Purse has been helping a lot, but the one thing we would need is money for a new car battery. We can't use the car anymore since our son is using our only car battery. We don't have a means of transportation."
So that really just stuck with me, not just their story, but also them not wanting to ask for much because they didn't want to take resources away from other people who they thought would have needed it more than they had. Everyone was like, "No, I don't need anything," even though they really did. It's just putting themselves aside.
And to me, that's the community we have that my quilt square is representing; caring and having empathy towards others no matter what situation you're in. "