Support Siwatu & His Family After Total Loss from Eaton Fire

Help Siwatu rebuild after losing his home in the Eaton Fire

On Jan. 8 our beloved son, friend, brother, and more, Siwatu Moore, left his family's home in Altadena, CA, with nothing but a change of clothes, his passport, and a pet turtle. His home has been destroyed, and he has nothing left.

We, the tight-knit and extremely diverse and disparate community of people who dearly love and care about him, want to stress both how devastating this loss is for Siwatu and his two beloved daughters, and how exceptionally admirable a human being we have known him to be, over in many cases several decades. Siwatu has been beyond open-hearted and generous with his family and community members, and we want to show the same love and support he has shown us.

Below, please read Siwatu’s recent heart-rending Facebook post. To that, we would just like to stress that he and his family have lost not only a home they had worked for years to build, but also lost clothes, Christmas gifts, and all of his writing. Anyone who knows Siwatu knows that after his two daughters and immediate family and friends, his creativity and ideas are of utmost importance to him. The incineration of two laptops containing years of his work, along with hard drives, notebooks, journals, and research materials, is an absolutely crushing loss, not only to him, but to us, and to the literary community.

Siwatu’s youngest daughter’s birthday is quickly approaching, followed by his own birthday in February; his oldest daughter’s was just this past December 29. We humbly ask you to please join us in making a generous gift to them in this tragic time.

All funds will be spent to help rebuild Siwatu and his family's life from the ground up, including but not limited to clothes, food, computer and other supplies, health expenses, and other expenses connected to the loss of a lifetime's worth of possessions.

Note: some of you may have seen that there is a GoFundMe in support of Dr. Rashida N'Gouamba, Siwatu's longtime partner. We, his friends and family, are completely supportive of that page and effort. We also felt it important to create this page to support Siwatu directly.

Also: this page was published by Greg Epstein, Siwatu's friend of 28+ years (Siwatu was best man at Greg's wedding), in consultation with and on behalf of Siwatu's mother Karen/Migozo Taylor, and all of the names below. For GoFundMe/legal purposes, we note that we all live in the United States and that those organizing and recieving funds are all U.S. citizens.

Sincerely,

Karen/Migozo Taylor, Siwatu’s mother, with Adande Roberts, his brother, and:

Stacey Casey, Siwatu's aunt

Dwayne Moore, Siwatu's uncle

Diarra Kilpatrick, Siwatu’s cousin

Nyasha Smith, Siwatu's cousin

Zuberi Moore, Siwatu's cousin

And friends:

Dr. Richard Carter

Greg M. Epstein, Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT

Khary D. Hornsby, J.D.

Gregory Nicholas

Matthew Young

***

On Jan. 10, Siwatu wrote:

Today will be the most difficult day of my life and at my age, I have had more than a few. Today we will tell our two children that we have lost our home. We will tell them that other than the things currently with us in this hotel room some forty miles from our property, all our possessions are lost.

This past Tuesday around 7pm, my four year old, just a hop skip and jump away from being five, was pressing a karaoke mic into my hand asking me to duet some Moana songs with her. It was one of her Christmas gifts. Her and her sister had barely gotten to play with them because we had spent the week after Christmas in Detroit celebrating my grandmother’s 90th birthday. The girls had a ball, but were happy to be home, back in our routines, back in our own space.

We lived in Altadena, a quaint town just north of Pasadena. Both idyllic places especially for families. We’d spent Christmas hosting one of my oldest friends and his own family in from Boston. Our children played together for hours, my girls sharing their toys with his children. We had known each other since undergrad and shared an unspoken joy at this scene we’d managed to luck into.

Now back to just our little unit, we were hunkering down like the third pig in his brick house, waiting out the big bad winds. We were used to the Santa Ana winds. I just had to take down the umbrellas, make sure the gates were locked and closed.

I played with my little girl while Rashida, my partner, rested. Our older daughter was in her room tucked in her bed catching up with friends on her iPad. I could not get the small white box to pair with my phone and the little one was getting impatient. Then came a knock at the door.

It was our neighbor from across the street. He and his wife and two year old son had just moved into the neighborhood this summer. The kids played together whenever we both happened to be outside hanging out at the end of the cul-de-sac where our house sat.

He told me that the neighborhood was being evacuated. Everyone on our street had already left or was preparing to and he wanted to make sure I knew. He was a good neighbor. All our neighbors were.

I asked him what was going on and he said a fire had broken out in Eaton Canyon and I followed his eyes as he looked past me toward the sky. I stepped off the porch and looked for myself. In the distance I could see the mountain that sat a few miles behind the neighborhood was glowing with orange veins of fire, a sight I had never seen.

I thanked him and immediately went inside to alert Rashida. She is a doctor and has a doctor’s temperament. She marshalled me into action telling me to pack a few days of clothing for each of the girls. She grabbed other essentials like medications and documents.

The suitcases we’d used for the Michigan trip were still sitting in the living room just unpacked mere hours earlier. I took them and began loading them up with clothing. The girls gathered a few toiletries, toys and knickknacks. Rashida told me to make sure I had all my documents. I grabbed my passport.

We were going to head over down the road about ten minutes to her mother’s house in Pasadena. It was not under evacuation orders as far as we knew. Heading south I saw an unbroken chain of headlights streaming down from the area north of us. Hundreds of cars, more families than I even knew lived up in the hills. We dropped the girls off and returned to the house to lock up and get our other car. Did you get everything, Rashida asked me. I told her I would get the pet turtle. If there was a ton of smoke, that wouldn’t be good for him I reasoned. I left out with the turtle and the clothes on my back.

I would come back in the morning I figured to check things out. Grab a change of clothes and head into the office. This was all just a precaution. After all, there had been no fires in the five years we’d been in the area, none that threatened homes anyway.

Upon returning to her mother’s house, I could still see the glowing mountain looming in the dark. It looked like a volcano poised to erupt. As I pulled up, the door was open and Rashida was motioning me to open up the cars. We were being evacuated from this part of Pasadena. Her mother would be coming with us now.

We loaded up the cars and debated where to go. Perhaps we could wait it out in her medical office. Maybe another friend’s house. Some had offered, but they were dealing with power outages and traffic was building. Her mother cannot climb too many stairs scuttling other options. We settled on a hotel in Chino some 35 miles from our neighborhood. Driving east on the 210, again I saw the mountain now even more alive with fire.

Once we settled into the room, I turned to the local stations to check the progress of the fire. It seemed contained to a neighboring community about five miles from us. I watched people watering their roofs trying to stave off the encroaching flames. I hadn’t understood at the time but the wind was creating a literal firestorm. The Santa Ana winds propelled millions of embers through the air in every direction and there was no shortage of places for them to land.

I went to sleep around 1am. The fire still seemed contained to the communities in the hills. I felt heartsick for them, but I was glad the fire didn’t seem to be spreading.

I awoke around 7am and immediately returned to the news coverage. Rashida’s mother was already up and on her phone. She said something that sounded impossible to me. The veterinary hospital on Lake and Alameda was on fire. That was less than a mile from our home. I couldn’t fathom how the fire had crossed so far, so fast. I refused to believe it, but then the image came up on the news. And there it was, the veterinary hospital engulfed. I had been many times while we cared for a family member’s dog a couple years ago. It would soon be gone.

A half hour later, new images came up. The stretch of businesses we frequented almost every week – a coffee shop, a hardware store, the bike shop where I’d gotten Rashida an electric bike for her birthday and my elder child her first full-sized bike – they were all skeletal and ablaze.

Minutes later the cameras moved up the block, closer to our home. The apartment complex we’d walked past countless times, saying good morning to residents walking their dogs, was now engulfed. The fire department was directly across the street. A lone fireman stood in the middle of the street spraying the wild flames with a hose.

I had to turn the television off. A few minutes later I was scrolling on the Nextdoor app. I never used it. Neighborhood gossip. Nothing good, but now it was critical. Someone posted a reported fire incident map. I checked it. A house on the corner of our street had a little flame emblem over it. Another home on the street directly behind us also had one. Our little thatch was clear, but my body was already beginning to go numb.

The girls were up watching cartoons. I could not tell Rashda or her mom what I was seeing without troubling the girls. We went to eat at a local Denny’s. Rashida confiscated the iPads, told her mom and I to get off our phones. I put mine down but streamed the local AM station through my earbud. I had left its twin on the floor somewhere in my bedroom.

We decided to occupy ourselves with errands. Fuel up the cars. Get food. Find clothes and toiletries. The girls stayed behind at the hotel with their grandmother. After the errands, I got back first. Rashida’s mother opened the hotel room door holding up her phone motioning for me to be quiet.

The image was of our house. Or rather what used to be our house. There was nothing but a broken chimney that sat between our living room and den. Literally there was nothing else. Not a wall, not a beam, not the outline of an object. Flattened. Obliterated. Everything.

The bedroom where the girls’ bunkbed had been was now empty space. All you could see was the brick wall behind the house that ran along the street to mitigate the traffic noise from the road.

Rashida’s mother told me she would take the girls downstairs for a while so I could break the news when she returned and we could think about how to tell the girls.

I agreed. I tried to be normal but my thoughts churned and I could not remain still. I paced then left the room. I’d wait for her to return outside.

When she finally pulled up, I could barely get the words out.

Sorry, I’m so sorry. It’s gone.

She gave me a soft smile and said it’s okay. It’s okay. We got what we needed. They are upstairs. We got what we needed.

I composed myself and we returned to the room. I asked how we would tell the girls. She, ever the doctor, said we would not until we had come up with a plan. We would not leave them feeling unsafe. They would be assured that we would make sure they stayed safe.

And so Rashida returned to work the next day. And I spent the day fielding texts and calls and emails and taking the girls somewhere nice to hang out with their friends. One last day before they would know this terrible thing. But they would have to know.

The little one, inundated with images of burning and flames and smoke and ruin asks uncomfortable questions. Is the jump park by our house fired? Is the fire still out there? I do not know how to answer. What song do you want to hear Zuzu Bee? Tell me and I will play it.

This tragedy is too great to feel pity for myself or my family. Our community is destroyed. Utterly and completely. We are one of a thousand, two thousand, perhaps more once the flames are extinguished and the smoke clears.

It is unfathomable. Incomprehensible. The grief is too great not to share. The mourning is too heavy to endure alone.

And thankfully, we do not endure this alone. But there is too much tragedy in this world. Ongoing. Unceasing.

We are fortunate though. We are loved. We are cared for. We are seen. For too many, that is not the case…

I am grateful for all of you.