Noele Aabye, a resettlement supervisor with Catholic Charities, works to check refugees who had been resettled in Asheville into a hotel in Matthews after they were forced to evacuate. Her own home was damaged when a poplar tree crashed through her dining room. (Liz Chandler | Catholic News Herald)ASHEVILLE — Noele Aabye was sitting with her dad at the dining room table, gearing up to work from home as Tropical Storm Helene passed through.
The power was out, and she’d been texting and calling clients and co-workers at Catholic Charities, so she walked out to her car to charge her phone.
A cracking sound made her look up, just as a large poplar sliced through her dining room. She froze, then freaked.
Was her dad hit?
Were her husband and teenage son OK?
Upstairs, her husband panicked, too. Last he’d seen, both his wife and father-in-law were sitting together in the room now occupied by the trunk of a tree that for years had brought the family joy through its tulip blooms.
Soon, everybody found each other, alive and safe. And while the trauma remains with her, what happened next was even more remarkable.
Across town, in Biltmore Village, several of Aabye’s clients were moving upstairs in a hotel away from rising floodwaters. They were refugees from Venezuela, fleeing their homeland, and assigned by the U.S. government to be resettled in Asheville by Catholic Charities’ refugee resettlement program.
Rescuers came by boat, ferrying her clients to safety. Now, the refugees would need yet another place to land.
Over the next several days, with no power or water in Asheville, the Catholic Charities resettlement team worked to relocate 40 “new arrival” refugees to Charlotte. They found housing, drove clients down the mountains in vans, checked them into hotels, then went shopping for basic necessities the refugees would need to restart their lives.
Aabye, a resettlement supervisor, helped pilot the relocation.
The whole Catholic Charities team, she says, went into overdrive across the Diocese of Charlotte – including two colleagues in Asheville who’d also lost their homes in the storm.
Aabye is almost infamous for going the extra mile for clients, colleagues say. Responding round the clock. Delivering goods and services. Working crazy hours to the point that her son leaves little notes when he goes to bed: “Missed you, mom. Proud of you.”
At a hotel in Matthews on Oct. 5, Aabye spent two hours checking in refugee families.
She worried about her house. She worried about her guinea pigs, who’d been whisked to a vet after the storm. She worried about how Catholic Charities’ 300 more-established refugee clients in Asheville had fared.
But none of that worry showed as she answered clients’ questions and explained how the next phase of their lives would unfold.
Next up that evening would be a trip to Walmart.
And finally, late that Saturday night, she’d head “home” – to a Charlotte hotel, where her husband and son waited. While it may only be temporary, the refugee resettlement supervisor had become a refugee herself.
— Liz Chandler