Bring Needed Help to Our Asheville Family!

You can see Chrystal Falls (which is supposed to be a road, not a waterfall) in the first 2 clips of this montage.

My family lives in a valley near Asheville NC, where Hurricane Helene caused huge floods and landslides all around our community. One family in our neighborhood lost 18 people, and a trailer park not far from us lost 80 people.

We spent a few terrifying days in our cabin with a road that was cut off from the outside world, not knowing if our loved ones including our daughter were dead or alive.

We had no water, electricity, or cell service. I was worried beyond measure that I would not have food to feed the two kids we had with us.

Thank God, our neighbors came with their heavy machinery and made the destroyed road passable and we were able to evacuate to Charlotte (I will never judge good old southern boys again!)

We are now raising funds to support individual family, neighbors, strangers, and charities that we have personally worked with to make it through the critical next few weeks.

Let me tell you about our neighbor Kurt. He is 72 years old, a retired nurse and life long Big Brother in the Big Brother program. He has never been married, doesn’t have kids, and lost his beloved brother last year, the last of his immediate family.

He recently endured a spinal tap and was awaiting brain surgery.

Instead of being immersed in loneliness, he has adopted our neighborhood as family and does so much for us all.

Throughout this summer in the heat, he often worked for hours a day with chainsaw to create a path from his house (on a very high hill above our cabin in a community called Chrystal Falls) to ours. My husband helped too. They were building this so that our family could walk his ridge line to see the mountains and the sunsets.

Kurt spent his entire life savings and years of his life building a beautiful Deltek home. When Hurricane Helene hit, although his house was still standing and intact, the road to his house (and many other beloved neighbors) was completely destroyed. It basically looked like a huge waterfall rather than a road. This is a very steep private road that will never be fixed by the county.

The only way Kurt was able to get out of his house 2 days after the storm was by coming down the walking path he made for us. It is also the path the fire department used to check to make sure everyone in the neighborhood was alive. It is now the only way to get in and out of Chrystal Falls.

What an incredible lesson: When you do something selfless for others, sometimes it helps rescue you as well.

We helped get gas to Kurt (a very rare resource right now) to get to the airport, where he is flying to Florida to be with his former sister in law.

With tears in my eyes as I talked to him yesterday, I said that I was praying that someday that road would miraculously be fixed so he could be our neighbor again (along with all our other neighbors whose houses were closed off with that road.)

We have been able to raise around $8000 dollars in 3 days (the bright spot to one of the worst weeks of my life.)

Here are some of the ways we've been able to help:

-$800 to a single father who needed to take his girls to safety.

-$400 to my scholarship Jkobe’s grandma whose food all rotted and had no money left to get her through the week.

-Feed to save a dear friends’ farm which is her livelihood, along with many supplies to her community that is somewhat trapped

-A generator and cash for groceries to more people including my brother’s family.

-Gas distributed to several neighbors who need to evacuate (including Kurt.)

-$300 to a stranger on Facebook with no means to make it through the week

-Money to Be Loved Asheville, a trusted non profit that my church works with.

-A generator for my own family so we can move back in sooner so we can hopefully still live and work.

Can you join us in helping our precious community that so desperately needs help right now?

I feel somewhat helpless with so much devastation around us. But if we could help this small pocket of people that we love it would mean the world to me.

Thank you so much, my friends and family. I am grateful for you now more than ever.

Kate and Justin Krause