In more than three decades of years of living in Morganton, Duabhav Lee said she had never seen any storm hit her hometown the way Helene did.
"It's heartbreaking," she said on Oct. 8. "There are still people without power."
Lee, a co-founder and board member of the N.C. Hmong Women Association, was able to regain power at her home just a few days after the storm. But she knows many relatives and friends, especially in Burke County, who've been displaced and are staying with other family members.
"A lot of elders are like, 'Oh, this is a flashback to us living in Laos, so we're made for this,'" said Nancy Xiong, cultural and education director of the nonprofit group Hmong Southeast Puavpheej.
North Carolina has the fourth largest Hmong population in the country 鈥� more than 13,000, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. Many reside in Catawba and Burke Counties.
Like other western North Carolina residents, many Hmong families in the area are dealing with long power outages and difficulty accessing food, clean water, and medications. Community leaders say Hmong residents, especially older folks who arrived as refugees after the Vietnam War, are dealing with additional challenges: Asian food staples, like rice and noodles, have become difficult to acquire, and those with limited English proficiency need help applying for federal aid.
The N.C. Hmong Women Association has partnered with and to organize Asian food donation drives, asking specifically for rice, noodles, canned vegetables, sauces, and other Asian grocery items that are hard to acquire from most donation distribution sites. Based on attendance at during the first few days after Helene, association co-founder and president Sendra Yang estimated that Helene impacted potentially 300 Hmong families.
鈥淎t the end of the day, getting through this disaster, having that comfort food is so important,鈥� Yang said.
Rice, noodles and other Asian food items are in high demand
Helene destroyed farms in its path, including those owned by Hmong residents.
"Many older folks have farms that feed, like, about 60% of their diet, and then they supplement the rest with what they get from the Asian grocery store," said Thea Yang, a resident of Hickory.
Yang added that her parents have a farm and that the storm decimated about half of their rice crop.
A number of Hmong farmers also regularly sell produce and other goods at a . That market has been closed since Helene.
"That farmers market is very essential to the Hmong community in North Carolina," said Duabhav Lee.
Interpretation needs for federal disaster relief programs
Community leaders also are , fluent in Hmong and English, to serve as interpreters for families who need help applying for FEMA assistance. They noted older Hmong folks with limited English are relying heavily on younger generations to inform them about post-storm recovery. Many people are not aware that FEMA assistance is available to them, Xiong said.
"We as the younger generations are on social media, watching the news, understand English. We can only spread awareness by word of mouth," Xiong said.
Translating from English to Hmong can be fairly challenging, said Thea Yang. There are many words in English that don't exist in the Hmong language, an issue that families have long been familiar with.
"You need not only skilled interpreters, but those with a lot of patience and those who are able to describe a word that doesn't exist in the Hmong language," Yang said. "It's almost like reading a Shakespeare play 鈥� I know it's in English, but you have to translate what it means and that difficulty is kind of similar to what it's like to translate from English to Hmong."
The Hmong Women Association has organized this month at the Hildebran Library to help members of their community fill out forms. They鈥檝e also organized at the Foothills Higher Education Center in Morganton on Saturday, Oct. 12 to help inform people about the Small Business Administration and FEMA programs.
In the two weeks since Helene devastated the western part of the state, FEMA officials say the agency has distributed more than $60 million dollars in individual assistance to North Carolinians.
North Carolina's Latino population is also dealing with similar language barrier issues. Latino-focused community organizations are also working to spread awareness and set up resources to help families apply for federal disaster aid.
"This is one of the first times I've seen such targeted outreach to our immigrant communities," said Thea Yang, commenting on the efforts to help Latino and Hmong residents in western NC.
Mee Moua, a former Minnesota state senator who lives in Cleveland County, said she would like to see state and local governments provide improved language access resources to the growing Hmong community in the region.
"It鈥檚 not enough to say that the community will come through," Moua said. "The federal and state and county resources have allocated resources for moments like this and we want to make sure for the long term that our people get access to those resources too. How do we make sure that barriers are removed so that our communities are not left out?"
