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Please help us fix our leaking roof.

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My name is Lucianne. I live in West Virginia with my deaf son Ian, his wife Dove, 2 little grandchildren age 4 & 9, & my partner Jimi. We are professional full time artists. It's raining. The house roof is leaking like a sieve. Getting much worse every day. Lots of water pouring in very near our business equipment & computer. No place to move it. It has plastic over it. Can't use it when it rains & for days afterward, as the water that gets trapped inside the roof keeps leaking down for days after each rain. Lots of buckets & containers & towels put down on the floor. Have to get bigger ones because there are too many drips for the coffee cans & the water keeps hitting the edge of the cans & splashing all around. The drip catching containers are a permanent part of each room. There's a leak right over the baby's bed. There is some rubber sheeting we had, that we put over one of the worst parts over a skylight, held down by old tires. But there's not enough rubber sheeting to cover the whole roof, & it's rotting even more under it. A friend sent us some tarps but the sun completely disintegrated them within 2 months & they crumbled. No one in our family have credit to get a loan to fix the roof. There's no money coming in to pay off a loan even if we could somehow get one. We have no homeowners insurance. A friend has been paying our electric bill for the last year. We now rely on food stamps to eat. Even if my kids & I put every penny of our stimulus checks together, whenever the hell they come, we don't have enough to fix the roof. Our professional artisan/festival vendor business, that used to pay our bills, but never enough to also fix the roof, came to an abrupt halt when Covid shut all our vending venues down. We had to use everupything we saved for roof repair in order to live. We have applied for unemployment, but the WV site says there is 1 issue with the application, but doesn't say what it is & there is no answer at the unemployment office, the governor's office & our senator's office. (This has been going on for a full year.) I've also written an email to President Biden about the unemployment situation, but also no response. We have nothing to sell that anyone wants to buy that would total a roof repair. I've posted our products on every online group that I can. Every penny that has come in has gone for bills, dish, soap, toilet paper, bare necessities. I have been prideful & very embarrassed about our dire situation, & have been posting cheerful posts on Facebook, but the truth I've been hiding is that I'm recovering from a pretty severe case of Covid for the last year & am immobilized by it most days. I'm fighting stage 3 kidney disease & cancer that I haven't told anyone about. Everyone thinks we are in quarantine because we are brave survivalists, but it's actually because I've been so sick. I'm scared that it may be possible that this roof will not last another winter with the snow weight on it. Our belongings are being ruined. I am beside myself with worry. I am almost 62 years old. I can't tell my son & his wife or my partner (who has had his hands full keeping me from dying of respiratory failure,) what I'm scared about. There is no one to help. We have nowhere else to go, & even if we did, no money to get there. I try to keep my family's hopes & spirits up every day, but I cry quietly in the middle of night so they won't get upset. Please. Please help us. I'm scared that this roof will fall down on our heads.

Organizer and beneficiary

Lucianne Saunders Vanilar House of Steel
Organizer
Montrose, WV
Mark Miljko
Beneficiary

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