This Thanksgiving week marks one month since Hurricane Melissa swept through Jamaica. Amid so much destruction, with key industries like tourism hobbled, it will take billions of dollars and years to rebuild. One Atlanta woman is making it her mission to help.

One of the first to arrive in Jamaica with aid and supplies, among relief agencies and organizations from around the world, was a single individual, a woman from Atlanta, Mary Alex Bowden.

For a decade, she and her husband, Keith, and their two children, Izzy and Leo, have vacationed in Jamaica. Staying year after year in the same modest hotel on the beach in Negril, they grew close to the people who worked there.

"There's a lot of locals that work there that are very devout, that have been there a long time, so you build family and connections there," Bowden said.

So, within hours of Hurricane Melissa's impact on the island, Bowden reached out to her best friend, Abi Gale.

"She was able to call me, just for a brief moment, let me know she was alive," she said.

But those that survived the storm were hungry; they needed emergency shelter and, with no ATMs working, money for critical items.

"If anyone were to call me and tell me that they don't have food, that they need me, I'm ... if I can do anything to help them, I will," Bowden said.

And so she did. Bowden collected every suitcase she could find, even from friends, and started packing — rice, noodles, oats, tuna, and flashlights — over 600 pounds of food and other items for the people who had given her something more over the years: memories.

"For me, I felt I needed to go. I said, 'I'm coming,'" she said.

With roads washed away and friends' houses destroyed, in a place that had provided so much joy for so many years, Bowden reached her friend with the food and supplies she and her family so desperately needed.

"She said, 'Sis, you're coming down here for one day?' And she said, 'I can't be here and have my friends and family suffering,'" Gale recalled. "Her heart is here, right? Not just friends, but family-wise. So, she has a very big heart."

So wherever your table is set this Thanksgiving, as we give thanks for the big acts of kindness in our lives, don't forget the quiet gestures, the small, simple acts that often matter most.

Bowden plans to return to Jamaica in February, and she's taking more supplies with her. The most needed items, she says, are clothing, sheets, books for children, and mosquito repellent — those everyday items we use and often take for granted.