Help Our Arizona Pioneer Family Rebuild After Wildfire

Hi, my name is Lorena and I am a fifth-generation Arizonan. My family and I recently lost our childhood home and everything in and around it due to a wildfire. We also lost our father Neil. Here is what our home means to us:

The Owenby clan has been in Arizona for seven generations. Comanches, Cherokees, and Texas Cowboys who blew off the Southern Plains, looking for freedom and adventure, new starts and tall grass.

In April of 2024, a wildfire swept across the family homestead along the banks of the Babocomari River of southeastern Arizona. It took our family patriarch and everything else. Three homes and a fourth in progress. Every photograph, string of beads, and moccasin, gone. Things that had survived for centuries, handed down from one generation to the next, gone.

Worse yet is our loss of home, of place. For generations, this was a place of refuge, a place where we knew that no matter what happened in life, there would always be a place for us. Over the years it has served this purpose, time and again. When there was a lost job, lost marriage, or just finding ourselves adrift in the world, children and grandchildren would have the homestead to return to. There would be a fire in the hearth, food in the cupboard, a shoulder to cry on, and a hand to lift you up. It was a place to pray, walk amongst the trees, weigh our options, gather ourselves, make new plans, and get our lives back in order. And throughout the years, children, parents, siblings, and cousins would come back for birthdays and holidays, weddings and funerals. This was the center of our world and now it is gone.

One of the homes had insurance, but it's pitifully little and we are still fighting the adjusters. Our hope is to clear off the charred rubble -- the insurance money, if it ever comes through, won't even cover this -- and put up a modest cabin, a place the grandchildren and their grandchildren can once again call home; a place to gather, regroup, share the old stories and build new memories.

Our costs will include, but I'm sure not be limited to, cleaning up the awful mess left by the fire, repairing and replacing water and electric lines, materials, labor and furnishings for a new home.

We know times are tough right now. But if you're so inclined, please consider helping to preserve and rebuild a part of Arizona's heritage and soul. Above all else, please share this far and wide, helping our pioneer family work toward another seven generations.

Alternately, you can donate through Zelle with phone number [phone redacted].

Thank you so much for your time and consideration.