Nine lives: Helene survivor rebuilds — in Ecuador
Lisa McDonald is not simply rebuilding what Hurricane Helene took from her — she’s replacing it with something that did not exist before.
“There was a definite calm before the storm,” McDonald told The Smoky Mountain News of her experience with Hurricane Helene in Hendersonville on Sept. 27, 2024.
“I looked out my front window; everything looked fine. I went to a side window, and I saw a downed tree in my backyard and thought, ‘Okay, this is bad, but we’ve experienced trees coming down before. We’ll get through this.’”
Seconds later, McDonald spotted several more downed trees in her front yard.
“You could not hear them. They were just coming out of the ground and laying themselves down,” she said. “Then they started coming into the house.”
When Helene was finally through with Western North Carolina, it wiped out her home and much of the physical infrastructure behind Sweet Bear Rescue Farm, the sanctuary she had spent nearly a decade building for animals rescued from abuse, neglect and abandonment.
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“Once I realized I was going to survive, something came over me and I walked out my front door, and I started walking down the street,” said McDonald. “I think I was in kind of a fugue state, maybe a little bit dissociated.”
What remained was the work itself, unchanged in its demands and indifferent to the loss that had reshaped everything around it. Animals still needed to be fed. Veterinary care still had to be provided. Daily routines still had to be maintained.
Like many, McDonald spent that first winter after the storm living in a camper. Along with another family, she attempted to pick up the pieces at Sweet Bear but described the frustration of having the motivation to rebuild amid an overwhelming sense of gridlock in storm relief efforts. She decided she needed out.
McDonald began taking housesitting gigs and eventually ended up in a mid-sized city in the mountains of Ecuador.
“I fell completely in love with Cuenca,” she said. “And so the idea of taking some of my passions — travel, veganism — and turning them into a positive just kind of fell into place. It became the logical next step.”
“Cuenca” means “basin.” McDonald compared the site to Asheville, which is also a rainforest that sits in a broad river valley flanked by mountains in the distance.
“There’s old Spanish architecture here next to Incan ruins,” she said. “I mean, you can literally walk through history here and the historic center of town, which is cobblestone streets, is absolutely beautiful. Cathedrals everywhere. The entire downtown is the UNESCO heritage site. It’s like walking through a fairy tale.”
McDonald’s decision was practical, but it created distance between the founder and the place that had defined her work, forcing a reconsideration of how that work could continue under new conditions. That reconsideration now has a geographic center far from the farm itself. Based in Cuenca, McDonald has launched Cuencana Vegana Tours, a travel venture designed to generate consistent funding for Sweet Bear while introducing visitors to the cultural and culinary landscape of the Andean city.
The tours are structured as small-group experiences, with itineraries built in advance and led by McDonald herself. Each trip combines plant-based dining, guided exploration and direct engagement with local businesses, markets and historic sites.
Cuenca itself unfolds as a place where borders blur and cultures fold into one another, a city shaped as much by its people as by its geography. North and South American influences mingle easily in daily life, not as parallel worlds but as a shared rhythm, where newcomers and locals move through the same spaces, share the same tables and participate in the same routines.
The result is a cohesive, walkable city that feels less like a destination and more like a community already in motion.
“Even when you’re at a restaurant, there’s so much kindness, and everyone is very tactile,” she said. “There’s a lot of like, hugging and long handshakes. You know what I mean? There’s celebration and community around food, even with strangers. It’s lovely.”
That sense of belonging arrives quickly, McDonald said. For travelers accustomed to movement, Cuenca offers something rarer than novelty — recognition. The city carries a familiarity that is difficult to explain but easy to feel.
Daily life reinforces that feeling through accessibility. The cost of living reshapes expectations, where a month’s stay can be managed on a modest budget and meals arrive not as luxuries but as constants. Fixed-price lunches fill tables across the city, offering full plates at a fraction of what they would cost elsewhere, while markets and small storefronts make it possible to assemble a meal for a few dollars with ingredients that are fresh, local and unprocessed.
Those markets anchor the city’s sensory experience. Open-air stalls overflow with produce, their colors and textures reflecting the surrounding landscape, while nearby bakeries scent the streets with warm bread. The experience recalls older European traditions, where food is immediate and unmediated, and where a simple combination of bread and fruit can feel complete.
“It is just extreme and such a contradiction from the life I had been living since the storm, you know, sleeping in a camper, covered in cats, looking at my condemned house,” McDonald said. “Now I’m just walking down the street with a baguette, eating avocados.”
That same accessibility shapes the city’s indulgences. Known for wine, chocolate, coffee and flowers — items sometimes treated as luxuries elsewhere — Cuenca’s offerings are woven into everyday life, available widely and without pretense.
Group size is intentionally limited to between four and eight people, allowing participants to move through the city without the insulation that often comes with larger tours. Interaction is direct, not mediated through layers of scheduling and coordination, and the experience is structured to encourage observation, conversation and participation rather than passive consumption.
McDonald positions herself as a host within that structure, maintaining continuity across the trip while guiding participants through the choices that shape how they encounter the city.
Underneath that design is a financial model tied directly to the needs of Sweet Bear Rescue Farm.
McDonald said up to 20% of all tour proceeds will be directed into what she calls the “After the Storm” fund, covering veterinary care, feed and infrastructure at the farm while also allowing for support of animal and humanitarian efforts in Ecuador when possible. The structure turns each booking into a source of operating revenue, creating a link between the experience of the traveler and the day-to-day requirements of the sanctuary.
Nonprofit funding models are often plagued by inconsistent funding, shaped by attention, timing and local conditions that can shift quickly. When Helene hit, it disrupted not only physical infrastructure but also the networks that supported Sweet Bear, from donors to events to volunteer availability. The loss exposed how dependent that model was on circumstances that could not be controlled.
By tying revenue to a repeatable experience, McDonald is attempting to build a system that operates independently of those variables. Travel demand, rather than local fundraising cycles, becomes the driver of income, and each completed trip contributes to a pool of resources that can be used for ongoing care.
“What I would really like to do is focus less on fundraising and more on building something that is more tactile,” she said. “I love service. I love hosting. I love planning events. I’ve got a background in project management, so doing something where instead of just asking people to help me fund my rescue, doing something that really enhances their lives.
The tour is based on cultural immersion because I want people to have a true Ecuadorian experience through music and food and dancing and walking and museums and nature.”
Sweet Bear Rescue Farm continues to operate, with caregivers managing daily routines and responding to the needs of animals that often require long-term or permanent care. The organization’s work has extended beyond its own property over time, with more than $20,000 raised for other nonprofits in North Carolina and internationally, reflecting an approach that connects local effort to broader networks of support.
McDonald’s tours build on that approach by adding a revenue stream that is not tied to the same conditions that made the farm vulnerable in the first place.
Whether that balance can be sustained will depend on factors that extend beyond any single decision. Travel demand fluctuates. Economic conditions shift. Interest in plant-based travel continues to evolve. Each of those variables will influence how the model performs over time, and whether it can deliver the consistency it is designed to create.
For now, McDonald’s transition reflects a different way of responding to loss — using the disruption as a starting point for something that did not exist prior to it and connecting Western North Carolina with a tiny piece of a larger world.
“My entire life has ministries of death and rebirth and death and rebirth, and I laugh because it sounds so tragic, but it has created a resiliency somewhere deep inside of me that just knows I will land on my feet,” she said. “I think that’s why I have so many cats, because we’ve all had nine lives.”
For more information, visit cuenca navegana.tours .
