Before Helene, her ministry helped the homeless in her town. Now, she lives among them

By Chelsea Bailey, CNN | Video by Mackenzie Happe and Zoë Todd, CNN

Swannanoa, North Carolina (CNN) — Before the storm, the natural beauty of this place was Cindy Riley’s source of comfort and peace, its river and creeks part of what called her to move back home after decades away.

While Swannanoa may not be as wealthy as nearby Asheville and other neighboring towns, Riley gained a sense of purpose, she said, in her job helping homeless and poor mothers, even if some of their interactions were terse or the work itself stirred a sense of distrust and fear from the wider community.

Never did Riley, who’d trained as a disaster relief chaplain, dream she would one day face a life crisis like those she’d helped her clients surmount.

Then, the floodwaters came.

It’s been exactly one month since Hurricane Helene unleashed a deluge on Western North Carolina, swelling rivers and dams until the waters burst from their banks with such terrifying force, they washed away anything in their path. At least 98 people died in the state alone. For many in Swannanoa, the devastation remains apocalyptic.

Memories of the storm still terrify Riley. How rivulets of water began snaking underneath her front door while she and her husband had their morning tea. How it took only minutes for the sheer force of the flood to buckle her garage door and inundate her home.

“The nice little creek that you go sit beside just to have a calm afternoon … all of a sudden it becomes this ferocious river taking over the whole neighborhood,” she said. “There was no way out and no warning.”

“This land that I love, it feels like it turned on me and betrayed me.”

Soon, Riley found herself living an emergency not unlike those she’d helped so many women in Swannanoa weather: no home, no resources, no idea what would come next.

The destruction would test her survival skills, of course. But it also would teach her things she’d never imagined, even in all her years with Swannanoa Valley Christian Ministry.

It would open her eyes to how outsiders see those in the throes of crisis – and how exhausting it can be to live through one.

In enduring Helene and the misery still stirring in its wake, Riley would come to see the community she serves as she never could have before the floods. She would finally, truly “get it.”

‘Swanna-nowhere’

Swannanoa has long had a reputation for being overlooked. About 18% of residents live below the poverty line, well above the national rate of 11%. Riley, who was born and raised in the hamlet of just over 5,000, said it’s always been a difficult place to live.

“It even had the nickname of ‘Swanna-nowhere,’” she said, “because no one wanted to live there.”

For nearly 50 years, the Swannanoa Valley Christian Ministry has provided food, clothing and direct financial relief to those who need it the most. A few years ago, the ministry’s director, Kevin Bates, tapped Riley to head Hope for Tomorrow – an 18-month transitional housing program for low-income mothers – as part of the broader mission.

The work is largely funded by donors, and in the past, ministry staff have had to “fight tooth and nail” for resources like tents, generators and stoves to distribute to the homeless, Bates recalled to CNN.

“We serve about 1 out of every 5 people who live in the Swannanoa Valley over the course of the year,” he said. “That number was growing, it felt, exponentially before the hurricane.”

As Helene’s torrents pushed their little creek over its banks last month, Riley and her husband, Dennis, grabbed what they could and fled to their SUV. As they backed out of the garage, she recalled, their neighbors screamed at them to hurry:

Water was pouring into the exhaust pipe.

“I think we got out in milliseconds before the car would have stalled,” Riley said.

Others faced worse. One neighbor got stranded on her porch, Riley said, surrounded by rust-colored water and soon was “literally wearing a sheet tied around her because she was so cold.”

The flood submerged their street, transforming trees into islands and leaving cars bobbing in several feet of water.

Meanwhile, in the neighboring town of Black Mountain, Bates watched from his daughter’s bedroom window as the Swannanoa River rose nearly 20 feet high and carried cars and trees downstream toward the town. His thoughts rushed to the low-income communities in the floodplains along the river’s banks and to friends like Cindy and Dennis.

“I knew that if I was seeing that kind of devastation and that volume of water that high up the watershed,” he said, “Swannanoa was going to get hit – and hit hard.”

‘It was like a ghost town’

Helene’s flood left half of Riley’s neighborhood underwater. She and her husband helped move all their neighbors – “from the youngest to the oldest” – to higher ground, she recalled. The woman wrapped in a sheet for warmth was saved, too. Then, the script flipped, and the couple was taken in by neighbors, fed and given a place to rest for the night.

When they finally could get out, they headed straight to a place they knew would be a refuge: Swannanoa Valley Christian Ministry.

“I knew that if we got as far as SVCM, we’d be able to find supplies and we would be OK,” Riley said. “And I knew there would be some shelter at Hope for Tomorrow for anybody in our neighborhood or elsewhere that might need it.”

But what they saw along the way was crushing.

The raging waters had split someone’s mobile home in half, forcing Riley and her husband to drive through its ruins.

Far worse, she recalled, was the stillness.

“There’s no people around, just devastation. It was like a ghost town.”

In those first days after the storm, more than a million people lost power. Residents relied on each other as Appalachia’s rugged terrain complicated efforts to get aid to the worst-hit areas. Countless people went missing, state records show – with 26 still lost weeks later.

When Riley and her husband finally made it to the ministry, Bates didn’t hesitate to offer them a place to stay at Hope for Tomorrow. Riley’s neighbor who’d been stranded in the sheet on her porch moved into a nearby unit.

Soon, Riley was penning a journal entry that captured how her new home already was changing her perspective: “I now live in an apartment no larger than a barracks in community with others who have found themselves homeless due to Helene or other misfortune.”

“In this season, I am learning that home is not about a structure but a way of life and a community.”

Meanwhile, other silver linings were emerging.

“Suddenly, there’s an influx” of the sort of resources and items Bates once begged for, he recalled, as donations poured into the hollers of North Carolina.

Volunteers showed up from across the country to launch search and rescue missions, cook up free meals, help clear mud and debris from homes and otherwise offer moral and emotional support to a community suddenly gripped by scarcity – and mounting grief.

“It was sort of like people’s humanity was showing and people opened up to one another as human beings again,” Bates said.

Even before she could fully comprehend how her own life was evolving, Riley started pitching in, too, one cup of water at a time.

“That gave me hope that where I work, where I get to go serve every day, there was something we were able to do to help our community,” she said.

But of course, now she also was among those in need.

‘That person was just trying to survive’

From the depths of her own devastation, Riley said she’s come to understand – perhaps for the first time in a career devoted to serving the least among us – the plight of those with no permanent address, no plan for their next meal, no promise of morning tea.

“Whether we have a home or whether we don’t have a home – none of that was the issue anymore,” she said.  “We were all on the same level playing ground and saw each other more as equals and worthy of care and dignity in a way that I’ve never seen.”

For all the safety and comfort she’s found in the Swannanoa Valley Christian Ministry and Hope for Tomorrow, Riley said the experience has opened her eyes.

Before Helene, Riley would bristle when some clients came off as demanding, perceiving them as a little ungrateful, she said. Now, she finds herself doing the same thing, and her expectations of how people should behave in the midst of a crisis have shifted.

“I think most of us are feeling this way, a lot of judgments I may have had before about someone’s attitude or various things, I’m, like, ‘Oh, I get it … That person was just trying to survive. They didn’t have the wherewithal to say that kindly. They took all they had just to say what they needed to say,’” she said.

Riley also is filled with a new sympathy for anyone grasping for a semblance of normalcy when their world is upside down.

“I’ve noticed that whatever we think is comforting for that person may not be,” she said. “There’s no way to know without asking that question: ‘Do you know what grounds you and helps you feel safe? We want to make sure you have that.’”

But after Helene, things may never go back to normal. There are sand dunes now in Swannanoa. The piles of silt, mud and debris have turned this once verdant valley into “open fields of cracked dirt,” Bates said.

The destruction is hard to describe, as is the flood’s impact on those who were already struggling, he said. FEMA estimates more than $100 million in individual assistance has been approved for North Carolina alone.

“We might be saying (recovery is) a marathon, but most people drop out after the first mile,” Bates said.

“This is an opportunity for us as a community to address some of these wider, systemic social issues and take a hard look in the mirror and say, ‘Why are we generous right now when we weren’t maybe as generous before?”’

Holding grief and joy, together

As Swannanoa leans into its recovery, Bates continues to reflect on a Bible passage in which Jewish exiles return and begin rebuilding their temple.

Amid their work, “two sounds of mourning and the rejoicing mingle together and create this one sound,” he said.

“There’s no judgment as to which is better,” Bates explained. “They’re both held together. And so, creating space where we can hold both grief and joy together is one of our goals and one of our hopes for our community.”

Riley and her husband were able to salvage a few pans and cups from their home, but nothing of any significance. Now, like so many others in Western North Carolina, they’re beginning the slow process of reconstructing the sort of life they had until just a month ago, thanks largely to donations and support from their community.

As Riley starts to rebuild, the parallel emotions – grief and hope – laid out in the ancient Biblical tale also reflect her own twin lessons from Helene.

“I’ve even wondered if this is part of my life journey so I can learn this better and be better prepared to help other people,” she said.

“I hope so.”

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