CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A camera, voice recorder and Prius. Fiora Mecale took nothing else when deciding this is how she would capture the impacts of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina.
She believed that through oral interviews and pictures, she could document history through these stories.
That's how she has helped her community as it suffered Helene's wrath.
“Every corner that we went down, I would make sure I had my camera ready and usually had video going, or I was ready to take a shot because sometimes we'd go around a corner and just all of a sudden, like it would look completely different and you'd see just absolute destruction," Mecale said.
She felt she needed to do something as she watched her hometown of Hendersonville get washed away by floodwaters.
"So we just started going out around town as far as we could to try to record what was happening," Mecale said.
A single day of sightseeing with her cousin revealed a much bigger issue.
As a graduate student at UNC Greensboro who went weeks without classes, she took a twist on a school assignment.
She was supposed to research an issue that needed action, but she never imagined that issue would be right in her own backyard.
"After several days of doing this together, I remember she looked at me, and she said that in all that was happening, although it seemed kind of silly, what we were doing felt like the most important thing that we could be doing," she said.
She captured voices and raw emotions of those who lost everything.
A family in Yancey County shared their story with her, one she believes will live in her head for a lifetime.
“Of course, the whole time I'm listening, I am astounded at the resiliency and courage that this couple, and that whole community had in not just surviving what they went through, but helping pick each other back up in the aftermath," Mecale said.
Each story required new visits to areas that were hit.
The mountains she called home became unfamiliar.
“We were driving. It's like every five, 10 minutes you just round the corner, and there was another landslide," she said. "There's another house at the bottom of a mountain that had just traveled miles and multiple people out there died in those landslides."
She captured vulnerable moments of the people of the mountains who struggled and still found hope.
"I started to collect the oral histories because it felt like a way that I would still be able to record their stories while being able to set this little piece of technology to the side that wasn't really going to get in the way, so that I could sit down with people one on one and have really just a conversation about what they had been through," Mecale said.
What she didn't know is how much of an impact those stories would have on her, as she, too, healed from the hurt caused by Helene.
"I left these homes feeling that I had been able to give people something,” she said. "And I don't think I can find words for the way that that's impacted me in the way that doing this has not only changed them, but it's changed me.”
