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Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, 2024. Weakened to a tropical depression, the massive storm moved across the Carolinas dumping rain. The catastrophic flooding caused by Helene has devastated much of western South Carolina and North Carolina.

Bakery owner delivers donations to western North Carolina

Manolo Betancur and volunteers load donations onto a pickup truck on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024.
Julian Berger
/
WFAE
Manolo Betancur and volunteers load donations onto a pickup truck on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024.

Bakery owner Manolo Betancur is one of many people in the Charlotte area collecting donations this week for western North Carolina.

Betancur and other volunteers packed up and headed to Marion Thursday morning to drop the donations off.

At 6:30 a.m., Betancur and his volunteers went over the plan at Manolo’s Bakery in east Charlotte before they made their way to western North Carolina.

They’ll drop off the donations to Centro Unido Latino Americano in Marion. The group will distribute them to Latinos and others affected by the storm.

“This is all about helping each other,” Betancur said. “This is the only way we can grow community. That is how humanity can get together in the bad times.”

The items donated include bottled water, nonperishable foods, toilet paper, diapers, pet food and bread baked by Johnson and Wales University students.

William Caballero of UpMortgage offered his truck to deliver donations.

“We connected on Monday and we planned it out and here we are on Thursday making the first trip of many we want to make,” Caballero said.

You can find a list of groups taking donations for western North Carolina here.

A fluent Spanish speaker, Julian Berger will focus on Latino communities in and around Charlotte, which make up the largest group of immigrants. He will also report on the thriving immigrant communities from other parts of the world — Indian Americans are the second-largest group of foreign-born Charlotteans, for example — that continue to grow in our region.