From staff writer Emily Belz: Some Christian aid groups are responding to the devastation of Hurricane Helene in their own backyards. Samaritan’s Purse, for example, is headquartered in hard-hit Boone, North Carolina. A number of CT staff were also in the path of the storm. Editorial director of news Kate Shellnutt is in Augusta, Georgia, which suffered extensive damage. News editor Daniel Silliman is in East Tennessee, where bridges and roads flooded out. Senior web developer Matt Metcalf lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where at least 40 people have died.

I was born and raised in Asheville, and I have family going back generations in the Appalachians. It was strange to interview people about a disaster in my hometown, especially as I knew my own family members were in need of water and food (they’re surviving!). But it also helped to be covering a place I know. When Amanda Held Opelt told me about checking on her aunts in a mountain holler and finding them eating saltines and garden vegetables, that’s a scene that felt familiar. Opelt hopes outsiders’ perceptions about poverty-stricken Appalachian hillbillies will change as they learn these stories. The close community, ingenuity, and resilience when they were cut off from the world—“That’s a different kind of wealth,” she said. 

“Churches still serve as the cornerstones of communal life in rural Appalachia,” she told me. “It’s church folks that are checking in on one another—accounting for one another, working together to collect water, and getting the sick and elderly out.”