Rebuild Hope for Meshael and Maggie After Tragedy

Our names are Meshael and Maggie. We're 21 and 22, and we're located in Coulterville, Illinois. On January 18, 2025, around 5:45 pm, our aunt's house, our home, set on fire where we were staying with all our belongings. We moved up here in October 2022 from Jacksonville, Florida, at 19 and 20, packing our trunk with clothes and that’s it because of homelessness. This was our last option until we got back on our feet! It was 6 of us living together all family and Females,61,57,56,22,21,20. 

It was a surge outlet, an electrical fire, and it spread to an outlet, and it hit my mom’s oxygen tanks in the living room. It spread quickly in under 3 minutes. Everyone made it out alive besides some of our aunts cats. Our two dogs luckily made it out. We lost a piece of our life today. It's so hard. All our documents, our financial savings in cash, necessities, dead family members' belongings, personal possessions, electronics, TVs, medicines, the list goes on… We all had just gone grocery shopping and necessities shopping just for it to be burnt.Everything you should have to start over we lost. Everything we started over with, we lost again.

It really takes a community, a village, to get through tragedy and traumatic situations. Especially not knowing the way forward or how to make it out. We’re currently staying in an Airbnb for a few weeks and we don’t know what we can do after this. Our main focus is getting back to Florida because we don’t have access to much out here! It’s scary, it’s traumatizing, and being in a new state, we don’t have the usual access/help, and the town we live in has no public transportation.We’ve been through homelessness but nothing like this ever before.  We came here as a last option. We’re hoping the community can really come through. Sharing or even donating helps so much.

Our cash apps are $wokenbylight and $hauntingyourheart!