For more than eight months now, Dondi Persyn and her team of volunteers have been cleaning, sorting and reuniting items lost in the July 4 flood with their rightful owners.
“This warehouse has been more than just cleaning items. It’s been a healing, mending space,” said Persyn. “People come and stay here for hours and share their story with us.”
Her mission got started when Persyn, who lives in Boerne, drove to Kerr County on July 5 to help look for the many people still missing.
Her group soon came across a deceased flood victim trapped in debris.
As they waited for a group to arrive with chainsaws to free him, Persyn said she felt the need to do something more.
“I remember, clear as day, this little boy’s picture. It looked like a school picture. And it was just laying there on the river. And next to it was some shirts, some woman’s shirts,” she said. “And I thought, they’re just so exposed. Their lives are so exposed, and I wanted to pick it up and get it back to who it belonged to. That’s how it started.”
By the end of that afternoon, first responders and other search crews began approaching Persyn to ask if she was the one collecting items found.
“Yeah, I think I am,” she remembered saying.
That night, she created the Facebook page Found On the Guadalupe River, which exploded with followers overnight.
Items began coming Persyn’s way fast, and soon she assembled a team of volunteers and a donated a space in Ingram to sort and clean the thousands of things she was collecting.
Every item was soaked, power washed, cleaned and catalogued.
The team then photographed each item and posted it on their page, which has now morphed into its own website.
Thousands of items have been claimed by people who came to the warehouse to collect their things.
“They’re symbols,” Persyn said. “They’re symbols of the time before.”
She still has thousands of photographs, handwritten letters, household items, stuffed animals, coolers, shoes — you name it.
“We had AirPods that were still working October, November,” said Persyn.
Now, as those in-person reunifications have slowed, Persyn and her team are packing it all up and moving what’s left into storage.
“I understand that people need time to grieve, and those that were ready to come and look came and looked,” she said. “And the ones that still need time, well, now they have time. We can just put things in storage and wait for them.”
Persyn and her team have also started “The Reverence Project.”
It’s a plan to find a future use for the items whose owners cannot be identified or those belonging to people who no longer want them.
“We’re going to transform them into art. We have a reverence quilt that local quilters are working on,” she said. “We have local artists that have come and picked out certain pieces that they’ll transform and use for community good and for healing.”
Search crews are still dropping found items into a bin sitting outside the doors of the group’s soon-to-close warehouse.
Now, those drop-offs will get to Persyn via text message.
A boot, fishing lures, and a walkie-talkie were left in the bin this week.
Most of the shoes found, Persyn said, were single shoes. She plans to donate them to a nonprofit benefitting amputees.
Finding a purpose for what’s been lost, but can’t be sent back home, is what Persyn will also focus on now.
“I want to move them on in a way that maintains the reverence that we’ve had all along,” said Persyn. “I don’t think the work will ever end. It’ll just change.”
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