But by the time they began to recover, they were hit with a string of natural disasters, from Hurricane Laura on the Gulf Coast in 2020 to a brutal winter storm in the South in 2021.
Our first story takes us to the border between Texas and Louisiana because that's where Hurricane Laura was expected to make landfall on Wednesday night.
Hurricane Laura battered Haiti and the Dominican Republic, killing dozens, before roaring across America's Gulf coast, hitting Louisiana and east Texas.