The first thing Katherine Morrison ever said to me came in at nine oh five on a Friday night, eight days after the water: Katherine Morrison here from Atlanta Lactation. I may be able to help. And then, before I could answer, the rest of it. That she lived in Atlanta so she would need to stay in Asheville. That she had friends there whose house was unharmed, and that they were good enough friends she could ask. And then the only question that actually mattered, which was whether there would be food and water for her when she arrived or whether she would need to bring her own from Atlanta, and she assumed the latter. She was right, and she did. She did not offer to come and be taken care of. She solved her own housing in two sentences and then made sure she would not be one more mouth on a supply chain that had already broken.
I told her what I knew, which was all secondhand and all terrible. That people were using the words war zone. That my own mother is up there and had told me the grocery stores were open again but cash only, and that she had found one gas station taking cards. That the surface water was contaminated and they were begging people to stop pulling water out of the creeks to flush their toilets. And Katherine wrote back a question that still makes me laugh two years later: what’s your connection? I assumed you were on the ground there. I was not on the ground. I was at a kitchen table four hours away with a phone in my hand, and a stranger had assumed from the way I was typing that I was standing in the mud. Then she asked me to send her the volunteer form so she could put her information somewhere organized, which almost nobody does in the first week, and she read our first ragged blog posts, the ones we were writing at midnight because families kept asking the same questions, and she told me they were beautiful and that I was crushing it, which I did not know I needed. Then she asked what she could bring for me, for Brandi, for the volunteers, and offered money instead of supplies if that would help more. I told her the truth, which was that money would be great, because we had just distributed more funds than we had received. Nine words, and they are the whole financial history of our response. Day eight, already underwater, never once caught up.
The next evening at 6:39 she wrote, I will be there by eight tomorrow morning. Makes sense to bring water purification? I told her to remember our start was nine thirty, and yes, bring purification, and please document the heck out of everything. At 10:23 that night my phone lit up with a set of bleach notes, that if anyone planned to bring bleach it had to be regular unscented, not thickened, and definitely not the splash free version. Two minutes later: hey there, that was obviously meant for the group text not for you. She had been ours for about twenty six hours and she was already writing the technical guidance and already sending it to the wrong person at half past ten at night. Her last message before bed was equipment triage, that she had four neonatal scales at her house and I should tell her whether to bring them. Four infant scales, sitting in her house, ready. I answered as best I could at that hour, which was that I thought the birth center had a scale but I really was not sure.
Somewhere in those two days she called me at ten at night and talked for hours. I was lying in the dark with my youngest asleep on my chest, the way you lie there long after you could have gotten up, and I fell asleep like that with the phone somewhere in the covers. Before six the next morning she was calling again, already on the road, already driving to Asheville, and she had not finished signing up. I called Brandi that morning and told her we had someone very intense on the way today, and that I could not tell yet whether she was the best thing that had ever happened to this program or a force none of us would be able to steer. Four days later, on a recorded call, I told Katherine that to her face, that I had braced myself for somebody impossible and she had turned out to be wonderful and it had changed my mind entirely, and she laughed at herself and said, I bet you felt like that about me when I first called you. I came on strong, because I had the adrenaline going and I was ready to pack up that night. I had it wrong, and I have never been happier to be wrong about anybody.
Here is what she was actually like, and I can tell you exactly, because our recordings start the day after she arrived and her voice is on them. She showed up to that first meeting on a phone, because she had no real internet anywhere in Asheville and not much cell service either. The team had been thrown out of a birth center that morning, our donations blocking their fire exit, everybody rerouted with no bathroom, and she opened by thanking the volunteers for showing up expecting a bathroom, not getting it, and being flexible, because when she told them there had been a change of plans every one of them said we’ll adapt, we’ll figure it out, we’ll make it work. Somebody asked whether a different product could stand in for bleach, since bleach was impossible to find anywhere in the region, and she did not soften it: no, it cannot be safely done, it does not disinfect the way bleach does, not even close, and that is a common myth. And when the volunteers got discouraged because we had run out of kits and they felt they had nothing to bring anybody, she said the thing I have quoted in every training since.
Our goal is not to build kits, drop them off and get on to the next location. Our goal is to be at the locations. The kits give us the opportunity to bring them something and open the door. But we can do our jobs without the kits. All you need is your heart and your hands and your sweet voice and your willingness to help. And I’m here to lighten the load for you.
She was also very funny in a dry way that carried a room full of exhausted people. When somebody called our new workspace at the Orange Peel a beautiful gathering place, she said, flatly, that she would not call it beautiful, it is a bar. She reported a mystery donation of human milk that somebody had dropped at that bar and left sitting on the open damp floor, a massive box, massive, she said, maybe with a cooler inside it, she could not tell. She told us, about two volunteers who had gone silent on a route, that she had heard nothing from these two adult, grown up, sixty year old women since eleven twenty one this morning. She wanted our volunteer form to say plainly that when you sign up for days you are expected to show up for them, with basically zero expectation that you are going to cancel unless there is a house fire.
And then there is the moment that tells you why she came at all. Her team was out at a site and found a stack of printed sterilization instructions, a good quarter inch thick, being handed to parents, and the instructions were wrong. One teaspoon of bleach per gallon of water, when it is two. Printed by another breastfeeding organization, which is the part that cut her. She said she hated that it was another breastfeeding organization giving out incorrect information, and that she loved that we were able to put correct information into the hands of the people who needed it. Our volunteer went around with a Sharpie and fixed the posters by hand. That is the whole war in one afternoon. Not villains. Good people printing the wrong number, and one woman from Atlanta with a marker, standing in the place where a national standard should be.
She told me, cheerfully, a few days in, that she was seeing significant value in waking up at four in the morning from a productivity perspective. I wrote back that I was already up at four, that I had to wake my kids in three minutes and then spend the day with middle school boys, because I am the second safety trained adult on our robotics team and without me they cannot go. She answered that four was her plan going forward and that she would try to be in bed by nine. She would not let anybody else do it, though. When we were sorting a route that would have made a volunteer leave home before dawn, she said she did not want somebody getting up at four in the morning to make it to Brandi’s. Four in the morning was for her. And in the middle of a list of operational fixes, with no transition and no warning, she wrote that a young relative of hers was in Newland pulling bodies out of mud, and that it was just unspeakably awful. Then, in the same message: we will be ok. One thing at a time. That is what the other end of the phone sounds like. Grief and a task list in one paragraph, because there is no time to separate them. On a call that same week she said, about the whole response, that everyone had promised her it would get better every day, and it had not gotten better, it had gotten worse, but that in the last two days she felt it had gotten better.
Then she did the hardest thing anybody did that fall, which was to tell us to stop. First about the donations, on a call, telling the team to quit chasing every well meant carload because it is almost always something we cannot use, and that we really had to press pause. Then, days later, from the road, dictating, thinking out loud the way you do when you are driving, that we were looking at a big shift away from collection and kit assembly toward support and advocacy and funds, that we would gladly take what was already in motion, and that beyond that we needed to get the message out that we wanted to stop solicitations of supplies and would probably be stopping kit production. I wrote our donors that night, thanked them, and told them we were pivoting, and I sent it to her half expecting a fight. She wrote back four words: yes this is just right. Anybody can start a donation drive. Almost nobody can end one, because ending one means telling generous people that their generosity has become the problem, and that is the most consistent failure in American disaster response. We stopped ours in nine days because a lactation consultant from Atlanta, one week in, read the room and said the unpopular thing out loud.
She had already told us she was leaving, and on that same call Brandi said what the rest of us were thinking, that when Monday came and it was Katherine’s last day, we needed to find someone to jump into the role unless she could do it virtually, because she had been irreplaceable in terms of deployment and logistics coordination every morning at that site. And then, quieter: I’m concerned about who’s going to fill in for you. Katherine’s answer was the least sentimental thing in the world, that she could do it from Atlanta too, and that it did not need to stop.
She left on a Tuesday and she had to. There was an emergency in her own practice, two of her consultants had norovirus, a third had gone home sick in the middle of the day, she was down thirty percent of her staff, and she had patients first thing in the morning. And still, driving south out of the mountains, she dictated a full situation report to me. Rent storage. Move out of the venue twenty percent at a time so they get a clean space back. The Black Mountain site has turned over to an entirely new crew who told our people, essentially, we’ve got it. Canton was quiet. And we were seeing things winding down rapidly, so she wanted to fully update me on that. Every bit of it turned out to be true. That afternoon I was on a grant call and somebody asked about the nine thirty morning briefings she and Brandi had been running, and I heard myself say out loud, this is her last day. I remember the nightly calls being her idea. She is not sure they were. Two weeks later Jayne was still saying when Katherine Morrison was here to orient people to a place. She was with us for ten days. We still tell time by her.
At the end of the hardest of those days, when everyone was frayed and nobody could see any progress at all, she sent the whole exhausted group the same benediction:
Babies in North Carolina are safer tonight than they were this morning, and safer every day because of the help you’re providing.
Whole teams went to sleep on that sentence and got up the next morning because of it, and so did I. Which is the part that should frighten anybody who plans for a living. Everything I have just described, the systems, the stopping, the four a.m., the benediction, rested on a woman who owns her own business and could afford to leave it, who happened to have friends with an unharmed house, who owned four infant scales, who answered a stranger’s text at nine at night, who brought her own drinking water and paid for her own gas, and who then drove home and saw patients the next morning with a third of her staff out sick. Nobody reimbursed her. No agency knew her name. There was no roster she could have been called up from. She found us because she went looking.
Voices from the Storm
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