transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of This Is Actually Happening, ad-free, right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Hi, listeners. Today's episode is the first of a two-part series about personal and community healing in the aftermath of the 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri. More than 150 people died in the tornado, one of the deadliest in US history. These two stories were brought to us by and co-produced with Pauline Bartolone and was funded in part by UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center as part of its Spreading Love Through the Media initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation. Today, we will hear from Nanda Nunnelly. And next week, we'll hear from Christy Davis, who you'll hear referred to in today's episode. And now on to Nanda's story. What if a Deadly Tornado Helped to Heal Old Wounds?

Speaker 2:
[01:04] When you truly think you're going to die, it's really strange, the things that come into your head. When you truly believe this is your last breath, you're going to die. And just, I am never going to be able to tell her I'm sorry.

Speaker 1:
[01:32] From Audible Originals, I'm Whit Missildine. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 402 What if a deadly tornado helped to heal old wounds?

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 2:
[02:47] My parents are both from Springfield, Missouri. My mother descends from some of the very first white people that came into that area. They were given land grants from fighting in the War of 1812. My father descends from some of the very first African Americans who were brought by force into Southwest Missouri area. But they ended up going to school together the first year the Springfield schools were integrated. My mother married, had two children, and then ended up being divorced. Then she started dating a man who she later found out was married. He didn't tell her that he was married, but she became pregnant. We're talking about the early 60s. She had a mental breakdown, basically. She was hospitalized, and when she was in the hospital was when she saw my father. And my father worked there as an orderly. And he saw her, and he was like, Zenith, what are you doing here? What are you doing here? And so she was crying and telling him all of these things, and he's like, come on, Zenith, there's ways that people can help you. She ended up getting out, was able to find a little house to rent, and she had her two children. She was sharing custody with her ex-husband. And one day my father walked by her house, and he stopped and came over and started talking to her. And then it was just became kind of a daily thing on his way going to work. But at that time, 1965, that was very frowned upon even for them to speak. So, of course, the family came to my mom and said, hey, you've got to stop this, you can't do this. And my father said, Zenith, we can't make any kind of waves or whatever, it's too difficult around here. But my mom was very adamant, no, you're a friend. It wasn't much longer. My dad happened to be there at her house, and the police came. My dad kind of scooted out the back door, and they came in and they took my mother's children from her and put her in a, at that time they called it an insane asylum. My mother has very vivid memories of being in the hospital and them telling her that they were going to do electric shock treatments on her, and that, you know, it wouldn't take but just a few electric shock treatments, and she would forget all about that inward boyfriend of hers. My father and his mother, they got a lawyer from Kansas City to come down. They were able to get my mother out, but they weren't able to give her custody of her kids again. Everyone in the family was very adamantly against my mother having anything to do with the black person. So at this point in time, my mother had lost her home that she was living in. So my mom went to stay at a house that the black lady that owned a house over on the black side of town there in Springfield. And again, my father was coming to visit, and I think it was during this process of time that her and him began to have more of a relationship other than just friendly. Someone came one night and burned a cross in the yard of the house that my mother was staying in. And they knew at that time they had to get out. And so, the first time they left, they had a friend of my dad's that drove them out of town, and they actually laid my mother in the car and covered her up so that they could get out of town without anybody stopping them. So they were able to get out of town. And then my mom and my dad at that time went to California. But again, my mother didn't have her children. So her mental state was fragile at that time anyways because of everything that had happened. I think she was out in California for about three or four months and then decided that she needed to come back and try to get her kids. So my mom came back. It was while she was home that time that she realized that she was pregnant with me. And she knew that if they found out that they would probably make her have an abortion. My two sisters, Zephyr and Vicki, were with their father. But my aunt Sharon, she had custody of my brother. So when my mom went to stay with her, my mom was able to be with my brother. One day, my mom was left at the house, at her sister's house. So my mom was there by herself with my brother, my older brother, who was fairly young at that time too. And she called the taxi and took my brother and got in the taxi and went to the airport and left. So she stole my brother from Missouri. So she got to California. At California at that time, was one of the few states in the United States that it was legal for black and white people to be together. And they could legally get married there. So I was born May 19th of 1967, two and a half weeks before Loving v. The State of Virginia was settled and changed what we know as far as in a racial marriage. So I was born in 1967 in Los Angeles. My sister came along in 1969. My father worked at the hospital there, General Hospital. My mom stayed at home and took care of us. Beginning in probably 1970, my two older sisters were able to start to come and visit. And so they would come for the summers. And they had a, you know, a pretty comfortable life. My father fought in Vietnam in the early aspects of it. He was an information specialist. So he spent most of his time in Cambodia, Laos. He was the disciplinarian. He was the, you're going to make straight A's, you're going to do this, you're going to do that. He was making sure that we rode the straight and narrow, you know. My dad was very respected by my friends also. My mom was very soft and kind. She had gone through so many things just to have her kids. In 1971, my parents decided to move to Joplin. Even though Springfield was very bigoted and racist in many ways, Joplin was very similar. My father, who had worked at General Hospital, building one of the very first computer systems for a hospital, my father couldn't get a job as a janitor here. So they, again, really, really struggled when we first moved back. My father, I think, began working on the railroad. But my father had fought in Vietnam, and so he had the ability to go to school and have it paid for. So he went to school and got his bachelor's degree. And at that time, he was so well liked by the faculty there, by everybody. They said, hey, Howard, if you'll go get your master's, we'll hire you as a teacher here. So that's what he did. And they hired him. But when they went to the very first faculty dinner before school was starting kind of thing, my father brought my mom with him. And the president of the college there was like, whoa, hang on a second. It's one thing where you will be the very first black faculty member, but you're with a white woman? Like, we didn't know all of this. So within two weeks, they took a professor from the English department and moved them to the business department and gave them my father's job. And then they were able to say that the job was no longer available. My father fought it, went to the ACLU, and he won the case. But the lawyer told him, you know, Howard, I don't know that you really want to take this job. I mean, it would probably be better for you to go someplace else. They're just going to find something wrong. And so it was at that time then that my parents decided to move to Springfield, Missouri. Like, I think 1977. And while he was there, again, one of his department heads said, you know, Howard, the rules are changing. We need to have someone with a doctorate degree. And so you really need to pursue your doctorate in order to be able to stay here. And so my father found Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I think it was 1979 when we moved to Bloomington. So we moved in the summertime, and it was the summer before my seventh grade year. That was probably the first times that I remember encountering racism on a face-to-face basis. I think in my seventh grade class, there was probably eight Black people. It was a big change. It was a huge change. I remember one time being at the pool and I was on a diving team, and I can remember this kid shaking the diving board. It was a high diving board, shaking it and using the N-word. My brother heard it, and my brother beat him up afterwards. The racism was very blatant in a lot of ways. There was a town called Martinsville, Indiana. We had a track meet there. I ran a couple of events, and one, two events. I can remember that a group of us had gone up on this hill overlooking the track, and this group of big kids come walking up. There was probably 10, 12 of them, and all of a sudden, my friends were gone, and it was only me. I can remember these kids immediately starting to hit me and kick me, and slamming me up against a tree, and almost passing out, and they're just punching me, and then getting me down on the ground, and there were some orange peels that were laying there from someone eating, and then stuffing orange peels in my mouth, and chewing tobacco, and then somehow just when I thought I was going to just die, I just thought I was going to pass out. One of my friends had gone down and alerted one of the track coaches or whatever, and they stopped it. I just remember it being like staying home from school for a couple of days because I was so sore. So the end of my seventh grade year, my sister had come home crying from school one day, and she was saying that these older girls had been mean to her. And I said, who are they? Who are they? And she said, Christy Davis. She named off of another person, I think there were two people. And I said, well, you know, don't you worry about it. I'll make sure that they cry like you've cried, like being that protective older sister. And that's how it started. When school started again in eighth grade from the very first day of school, seeing her and going, that's Christy Davis. That's the one. I remember thinking of just making her life uncomfortable. It was bullying. It was being a bully. It was so horrible. I look back on it and I remember it being like an everyday occurrence. Whether it was just shoving her as she walked down the hallway, or trying to put her in her locker, or just mumbling something mean to her, or once it started with me, it took on this whole other realm when other people started in. If she's walking with her books, like someone on one side hitting her on this side, and then someone hitting her on this side, I say hitting her, but bumping into her, to where her books would fall on the floor, and sometimes it was just staring at her. It was doing it in such a way that we weren't going to be caught. She was blonde-headed. She was a pretty girl. She was, I think, a little bit shy maybe. I remember her being smart. She would just get nervous when she would see me and drop her head or drop her eyes and try to, and to me, that was like, okay, she knows her place right now. I liked it when she felt like she couldn't look at me. I think, okay, was it that she was everything that I wasn't? This little blonde haired, blue-eyed girl, pretty girl that did that play into me, that because of some of the racism that I was enduring, making her uncomfortable around me was like me somehow taking back some of the power that had been taken away from me. I don't remember thinking that at the time, but as I look back, was that part of it?

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 5:
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Speaker 2:
[18:53] We came back to Joplin, and I graduated in 1985. I got married in 1987. I went to college for two years, and then got pregnant before I got married. I got pregnant with my first child, and I dropped out of college at that time. I had my first two children. My third child was born in 1992. At that time, I was working for a laboratory, and that's kind of work that I've done ever since. My husband and I divorced in 2000, and then I got remarried. Not long after that, we had been living separate for two years pretty much. So I got married later in 2000 to my husband that I'm married to now. My oldest daughter got married and moved away. My son graduated and moved down to New Mexico. And so I just had my youngest daughter in the house. She had just graduated high school. I was pretty unhappy with my job. My job had become just so much. And it was my birthday on May 19th. I remember I went in for that half day, and I just remember pulling up to my job and thinking, oh my god, I wish I never had to come in here again. And so we left that day, and we went down to Eureka Springs for my birthday weekend. And then on Sunday, May 22nd, we were driving back home when my daughter had called and said, Mom, there's a storm that's supposed to be coming. I pulled out my phone at that time and looked, and there was this huge thing on the map that showed this storm coming in as we're driving home. And she was at her boyfriend's house at that time. And I said, well, you just stay at your boyfriend's house after this storm passes over. Then you come home. We got home. And when we were pulling into the driveway, like the sky looked very strange. I feel like you can tell when a tornado is round because the sky looks sick. That's the only way I can explain it. It looks kind of green-tinged and it just looks like it's sick. So we get inside and because I had to work the next morning, I thought, let me jump in and take a shower. And as soon as I got out of the shower, the sirens went off. The first sirens went off. We didn't have a basement. There was no basement in this house. So the sirens went off. We got into the closet. My husband and I and our little dog, we've got a little miniature Datsun. And then the sirens went off again. And so we understood that to be that was the all clear. So we got out of the closet, went out onto the front porch. And when we went onto the front porch at that time, a lot of the stuff that had been on the front porch was gone. The roof of the front porch was gone. We just looked down the street, and you could see what looked like a wall of rain or something down the street. Like, you couldn't see anything past it. It was this huge wall. And there were little things that you would just see shooting through, like right to left. And it took a second to understand. My husband was like, wow, is that rain? And all of a sudden it hit me. That's the tornado. That was the tornado just right down the street. And that was the stuff blowing in the tornado going around and around. And so we ran back in the house and jumped in the closet again. Then within just seconds, it was so loud that it was quiet. The sound of the tornado was so extremely loud that everything was shut off. It was like standing in between two rail lines, with trains going by you and you're standing in the middle. And it's like that, it's like so loud that you can't hear anything. And the suction was like pulling your eardrums out. The wall behind us started just swaying back and forth, back and forth like we could feel it kind of beating our backs. Things hitting on the wall and the wall just going back and forth. The roof started coming off and you could literally see outside through the roof. And my husband was sitting next to me, my husband, 250, 260 pounds. He's in the floor next to me. I've got the dog on my lap and he's next to me. And all of a sudden, like the roof had come off kind of right above his head and he's raising up off of the floor. And I'm leaning over onto him, like holding him down with my arm, with holding the dog. And as I'm doing that, the doors of her closet in my daughter's bedroom, where they came together, there was just a small little sliver of an opening. And I remember looking into that opening and I can see into her room. And there is just this beautiful like prism of stuff spinning around. It looked like fairy dust. Like it's spinning around inside the room, just flying things. And it took a second to click in my head that that was glass. That was literally pieces of glass. And so I just remember like trying to push that door closed more. I'm praying the Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary and thinking in my head, is this going to hurt? If I'm dying, is this going to hurt? Dear God, please don't let it hurt. And then being like, oh my God, Chrissy Davis' face comes to me. I hadn't thought about her for a while beforehand. It wasn't like something had just happened that I thought about her. But like in my head thinking, this is it. This is going to be the last thing that happens to me. And I'm like, oh my God, I never got to tell her I'm sorry. And then just as quickly as it came, everything just stopped. That was literally maybe 30, 40 seconds. But it seemed like forever. At that time, I remember thinking we're in the eye of the tornado. Like you always think of the eye, you know, and so I remember thinking we can't move, we can't get out of here yet. You know, we've got to stay where we are because there's going to be a whole other thing that hits us. And then it didn't come, it didn't come. And so we finally open up the doors and start to crawl out. And as we came out into my daughter's bedroom, she had two huge windows in her bedroom and there was nothing, like the windows were gone, like everything was blown out. There was pieces of glass sticking up in her bed, like out of her bed, like window panes sticking down into the mattress of the bed. It was totally gray with insulation covered in mud, that it was just everywhere. And it's totally dark. We couldn't see hardly anything. And I'm in my pajamas, no shoes on, he's in his shorts, no shoes on. And we're trying to like crawl out and think how do we get out of the house? That's what is very interesting about being in a tornado. We're so programmed to go in and out doors. But my house had no windows. But it didn't occur to us to try to climb out the window. We're trying to get to a door, you know, because we're so programmed to go in and out these doors. So luckily for me, as we crawled into my bedroom area, I had a pair of Harley-Davidson boots, leather boots. I mean, God somehow just like put them right there, both of them together. I was like, oh, my boots. I put them on. My husband finds one leather shoe and we could hear gas and you could start to smell gas. And so the only thing we found was one of my pink leather crocs that I wore to work all the time in the lab. And so my husband puts on this pink croc and one leather shoe. I've got on my boots, holding the dog. We start trying to get out the back of the house because the front of the house, you couldn't even see the road out in front because it was just covered in trees. And so we thought, well, let's go out the back. The back of our house was, patio was made with these glass blocks. And a lot of these blocks are gone. Like the whole walls are gone that we could have crawled out of. But no, we're over here trying to fight with this door to get out the door because in our minds, you've got to go out the door. I laugh about that now because why did we do that? And then finally it was like, oh my God, we can't make it out the door. There's no way, again, trees everywhere. And so we ended up then kind of crawling out one of the sides over where the glass blocks were busted. The main thing I was feeling at that time when we came out was how I couldn't identify anything because everything looked different. It was covered in muddy insulation, like kind of pink insulation stuff. When it comes out and it's all over and it's in mud, it was just coated on everything. Nothing looked like it should. It was very random some of the things too. We had a fireplace and a big screen television that sat on top of this fireplace, and there was a mirror back behind. And on each side were these little delicate glass things sat on each side. So there was like a place you could put a candle in or whatever. And I'll never forget when we got into like the living room area to try to get out the back, the television gone, the mirror gone. And here's these two little delicate candle things still sitting right there, totally covered in mud and insulation, but like they hadn't been touched. It was just so random. I just, I think more than anything, it was like Alice in Wonderland, you know, like nothing made sense. So we get out of the house and the first view that I took outside of the house, like it was all gone. You could see for a mile straight from my back. There were no houses. There was foundations and water shooting up. But there were no houses and I can just remember screaming, oh my God, our neighbors, where are our neighbors? Where are our neighbors? The pictures that people have of the tornado are so sanitized because by the time that people were there to take the pictures, people came through within an hour and were cutting trees and kind of clearing ways for ambulances to be able to get through or whatever. No one got any pictures of what it looked like immediately afterwards. As bad as it is, it was so much worse. Our house, because of how it was made, this rebar and then the concrete stamped into it, our roof came off, but the wall still stood. All the windows were gone, but the wall still stood. But it shifted the house on its base. The other thing, we didn't have a car. The garage door imploded out and wrapped around our car. Like the car was still there, but the garage door wrapped all around the car. It was the strangest thing. Like vehicles were just picked up and thrown here, there and everywhere. We had a little boy come down the street and he was like screaming and yelling. And we were like, you know, where do we go? We don't and he's like, there's a house right down the way that hasn't been damaged. And so we just headed down there. We got there and there were quite a few people that were injured and quite a few people that were hurt. We didn't have our phones. So we couldn't call anybody or any of that. But once we got to the safe house, there were a lot of people who were really hurt. People who had glass in them. There was a lady who was having chest pains. There was one guy that had a broken leg. There was one lady that had a phone. And she said, I've been trying to call 911, but I can't get through. And I said, well, do you mind if I keep trying? And so I took her phone and I just dialed 911 over and over and over again. And it finally came through. And I will never forget this. The lady who answered the phone, I said, there's about 10 people here who are hurt very badly. We need an ambulance. We need an ambulance now. We were just hit by a tornado. And she's like, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, calm down, calm down. She goes, listen, she said, you don't understand. All of Joplin has been hit by a tornado. We will get there when we can. In our mind, we thought that it had just hit like our neighborhood. And that's that's kind of what has happened with tornadoes before. Like they'll just kind of drop down and hit one little area and then they go back up and they go on. This tornado made this trek from one side of Joplin all the way over to the other side. I called my mom. She came, picked us up. And then my mind went to, oh my gosh, I hope Zara stayed at her boyfriend's house. Once we checked on Zara and made sure everything, you know, that my daughter was okay, we thought, let's go back and check. And we wanted to get our phones as well, try to get to our house to get our phones. And we wanted to check on my husband's grandmother. She was moved to an elderly care home about two blocks behind us. And when we got out of the house, it hit me, you know, when we looked out behind, we didn't see that house. And so when we walked back through the house where my husband's grandmother had been, was no longer there. She had been killed in the tornado. One of my daughter's good friends, when the sirens were going off, he was in a SUV that had a sunroof, and he was sticking his head outside of that sunroof videoing. And he ended up being sucked out of the car and ended up being killed in the tornado. Because there were so many people that they found in different places and whatever, they ended up having to do DNA identification. I remember the next day when it was light again, we tried to drive down actually to get to my office, and they already had brought in like the National Guard. And it didn't compute that all of Joplin had been hit. Like in our mind, it was just our little world. And to see it and to see how huge it was, we could tell that the house was unlivable immediately after the tornado. So pretty much immediately, it was, you know, scrambling to try to find some place. And because there were hundreds and hundreds of people doing the exact same thing at the exact same time, you know, there was just nothing available in Joplin. In Joplin, at that time, you couldn't breathe, it was hard to breathe, you were constantly getting things in your throat. People can't even begin to understand how asbestos and the insulation, the little teeny tiny hairs that are in insulation just kind of floats around. So I was having some really hard times breathing. I was a laboratory manager for a pathology laboratory and it was maybe two days later that they were wanting me to come back to work and I just, I was like, there's no way that I can come back. So I had a sister who lived in Branson, so we decided to move to Branson. Branson was like being able to breathe fresh air. We spent about six months, neither my husband or I worked at that time. We were really just trying to put together our life again. I'll never forget one of the first things we did in Branson, we bought season passes to a place called Silver Dollar City. It's an amusement park and my husband and I would go almost every day and just ride roller coasters over and over and over again. But it was just like a way of decompressing from everything. So, after we got to Branson and like, you know, I felt safe, I kept remembering, God, if you'll let me live, you know, I'll reach out and tell Christy, I'm sorry. In that moment where you think you're going to die, and when you truly know that you have wronged a person, and that person's face is what you see, I think that most people would say I have to do this. I mean, I could have seen a lot of people at that moment, you know, I could have seen, you know, like my other children that weren't there, I could have seen their faces, I didn't see their faces, I saw Christy's face. When you truly think you're going to die, it's really strange, the things that come into your head, where you truly believe this is your last breath, you're going to die, and just, I am never going to be able to tell her I'm sorry. And so I was like, man, I got to find her. There's one thing that I'm going to do, I'm going to find her and I'm going to tell her that I'm sorry. And so I thought, well, I'm just going to send her a message. She may never read it, but maybe she'll see it someday. So I basically said, you know, that I had been wanting to contact her for a long time throughout the years, that I am sorry for everything that I did to you. And I told her that I was ashamed, that I had treated another person with such disrespect. And I wanted her to know that I understood that I was not worthy of her forgiveness. Like I wasn't saying you have to forgive me. I, you know, that's her choice. I just wanted her to know that I wanted to say that I was sorry. And then I did tell her a little bit about, you know, raising my three children and that they had been bullied at different times in their life. And it always came back to me that I had done that to someone else. I told her the story of the tornado and seeing her face and knowing that I had to tell her I was sorry. She responded back. She said, Nanda, bless your heart. It means so much to me to read these words from you. It's a very healing experience and I have tears running down my face. I have to tell you this is really bizarre. Just today, I found this message nearly a year after you sent it. I saw your earlier Facebook request, but never this message until today. I denied your Facebook request. I thought you were coming back for another swipe at me. Other than my father, you were one of the few people that I feared with my life. Like him, you were a lot bigger than me at that time. I am so glad I found your message today. Adolescence is a rough road. I too have reached out to some people through Facebook and made some apologies. I did some horrible things, tried to make some people feel small and I really do regret it. Most people have forgiven me but some have not and I just have to accept that. Thank you Nanda. Of course, I accept your apology. I would like to believe that we were all just doing the best we could at that time. Take care, Christy. This started the back and forth of us talking. I wanted her to know more than anything like there's no why. There's no reason that I can say this is why I did this. There's no excuse for it. But I did in that response, I did talk about being attacked at the track meet in Martinsville. So I do in my mind feel like hurt people hurt people. And I don't know in eighth grade if you can truly understand how hurt you are. And so I think, yeah, a lot of different things going on there. But definitely the fact that I had truly been hurt. I was living with hurt within myself. I remember just crying. It felt like a million bricks being taken off of my shoulders. You know, this just feeling of like I carried this thing for so long inside of me, knowing that I had caused another person such pain. And to be able to say, I'm sorry, it really felt like just being lifted, you know. There's never a wrong time to say that you're sorry. It may take years to be able to say it, but it's releasing. It's not saying I'm sorry just for them to hear that, but for you to say it is so important. What really brought us back to Joplin was my oldest daughter got married and became pregnant with my first grandchild. My grandson was born and we moved back in 2016. When we came back, they had put up murals all over Joplin. I think that when something horrific like that happens, art is often a way for people to come together, to bring the community together, and also a way for there to be a collective breathing. You know, like different groups had gotten together and painted murals, and some of them were just geometrical shapes. Some of them told a story. Some of them were dedicated to different people. Some of them were dedicated to the storm itself. One of the stories associated with the tornado that was very prevalent, was a story about the butterfly people. There were many children that had been in the storm that were injured, some of them not injured at all, but found in very unbelievable places. And they said that they had seen butterfly people. And in explaining it, it was people with what looked like butterfly wings. And so, butterflies began to be a symbol of the tornado here. There's a mural in particular that I'm thinking of, I think one of the first murals that was painted that had butterflies in it. So, I mean, there was a lot of ways that I think people had kind of come together. But I think I was a little bit disappointed in that, you know, I don't mean to sit here and, like, criticize. But I felt like, instead of building back Joplin in a better way, they built it back the exact same, with the same issues and some of the same problems. And so, I felt like there were some opportunities that were missed for them to do better. But it's interesting because I've also heard stories of, you know, people that were stealing things or this or that. I never witnessed any of that. I only witnessed people helping people driving by and handing out sandwiches and water. And I do believe, you know, that it did bring the community together. You know, you can always kind of rest on some of the bad things. But there was a lot of love in the community. I don't know how anyone could go through that and lose your house, everything that you surround yourself with in a home, and come out and not think about how can I help the next person? What can I do to help the next person? The day after the tornado, there were still sirens going off, actively going off. And people were still out there passing out sandwiches and making sure we had water. To me, how can I not make sure that my fellow community member has food and water when they need it? There's a lot of people that that changed. It was not just me. There were a lot of people that felt that. I also think that having been a person where you're driving through a line or walking up to a building to get something for free, I can remember when we got down to Branson and we first rented our first little apartment there, we didn't have any sheets or comforters or anything like that. And so on one of our trips back to Joplin, we still hadn't received any money from our insurance. We came back to Joplin to get some things and I was told, hey, there's a church down the street here. Someone's donated a whole bunch of like household goods and that kind of thing. And so we went down there and sure enough, they had comforters. Just to get sheets and a comforter for free and be able to not have to worry about purchasing that. I mean, it was like life changing for us at that moment in time, you know? Pretty quickly when I got back to Joplin, I went to work for the hospital where I had worked previously. And before I had left, I had been involved with the theater and with the arts community and several different other groups. But pretty quickly after moving back, the first thing we started was just a place. It was actually called a woman's place. And it was a little building that we rented. We just did activities for women to be able to come in and we had yoga and we had art classes and we had just places for women to come and speak and talk and breathe. And then pretty quickly there after the Community Center that had been part of the Joplin Community since 1946, called the Negro Service Council of Joplin. They were looking for new people to come in and help run this place. And so myself and three other ladies, we all ended up being voted in as the President, Vice President, Treasurer and Secretary. I think that was in 2019. This organization, the Negro Service Council, it started in 1946, whenever Joplin was still segregated. And it was primarily a place for black people to be able to come and hold social events and educational events outside of church. You know, at that time, they weren't allowed to go to the YMCA or to go to some of the larger areas where they could hold parties or dances or that kind of thing. And then throughout the years, it kind of changed. When we took over in 2019, that was kind of our goal, was to make it to where it was actively being used by the community. And we started doing community service. In February of 2020, there was a really bad storm that came through, frigid temperatures for several days. There was snow and all kinds of things with it. So we got together as a board and just decided, hey, we've got to do something. People have got to stay alive. And so we opened up. The very first time we opened, we had probably 70 people inside the building every night. And then the summer came and it was really, really hot. And so we opened then. And so from that point on, moving forward, we open up as a warming center. We open up as a cooling center in the summer. We feed every weekend. We have free available for people to come and eat breakfast, come and eat lunch. We have now put in a washer and dryer and a shower. In my volunteer world, we offer services for people suffering with substance abuse disorders. We offer programs and direct them to different places where they can get help. Through my business, we also provide like Narcan and wound care kits and those type of things. One of the things that is unique about us is that this second year that we were open, we had a couple of people that had animals and they weren't going to come in unless their animals could come in. And I know how much I love my animals and there's not any other shelters around here that allow people to bring their animals. But we said, hey, people who have animals are going to be our first priority. We're not going to have people freeze to death because they couldn't come inside because they have a dog or a cat. That is something that is unique about us. They have to have their dog on a leash or in a crate when they're inside the building. Oftentimes, we'll get dogs kind of growling in the night. But we learned a lot about what we can do to make them feel valued and to make sure that we're caring for them. One time, this gentleman showed up and his girlfriend, and you could tell they had been actively using. They laid down on the floor and they went to sleep and they didn't move. They slept for like a full day and night. When they woke up, the gentleman, he was anything you wanted him to do. Can I take the trash out? Can I do this? Can I do this? Can I mop the floor? The last day, they wanted to cook dinner for us, for the volunteers. The next year, I didn't see him. But the following year, we had a fundraiser in the summertime. We were serving food, and this man had come in. I looked at him, and he goes, Nanda, do you remember who I am? You know, it took a second. And I was like, yes. Yes, I do. He goes, I slept right there. I happened to be standing right there. He goes, I slept right there for days. And he said, I'm clean now. He said, my girlfriend didn't go with me. But I signed myself in after that. And I've been clean for two years. And it was just like, wow, like one person. And so those are the little things that we live for. Now, that doesn't happen all the time. And it may not stick, you know. But that one person that it does, you know, it just changes everything. For me, going through the tornado, there is before the tornado and after the tornado. Like it's set time. Everything is different. There's not a single thing that I can say that it didn't change me in in some way. Like, I mean, I've always been an outspoken person. But after the tornado, it's like, you know what? I've got to make sure my voice is heard. You know, I've got to make sure that I step up and do what needs to be done. You know, we lost a lot of people in the tornado. And I'm not saying that the tornado made the world better. But I do believe that out of tragedy comes many blessings. For me, out of that tragedy came the blessing of being able to say, I'm sorry, and community before the tornado and every single job that I have had since the tornado, it has been around community. And I think it's important that we find those blessings and you have to open up yourself to be able to give blessings to others.

Speaker 1:
[54:28] Today's episode featured Nanda Nunnelly. This episode was brought to us by and co-produced with Pauline Bartolone, and was funded in part by UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center as part of its Spreading Love Through the Media initiative supported by the John Templeton Foundation. If you'd like to hear some deeper reflection on Nanda's story as well as reflections on the last few episodes and updates about the show, please subscribe to my Substack called Beyond The Story at whitmissildine.substack.com. If you'd like to reach out to Nanda, you can find her email, socials and websites in the show notes. From Audible Originals, you are listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music to listen ad free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Whit Missildine. Today's episode was co-produced by me, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. We'd also like to thank Head of Creative Development at Audible, Kate Navin. Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louie. And Chief Content Officer, Rachel Giazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound Recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. The opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velasquez. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram at Actually Happening. On the show's website, thisisactuallyhappening.com, you can find out more about the podcast, contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store. Where you can find This Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, t-shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's thisisactuallyhappening.com. And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com/happening. Even $2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening. Follow This Is Actually Happening on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of This Is Actually Happening ad-free by joining Audible.