On Puerto Rico, Part I
the people
At one of the Brigada Solidaria del Oeste (BSO) volunteer meetings, I heard a man recount how, in the first few days after the hurricane, he and his daughter had gone outside with their machetes and started clearing the roads only to hear voices coming from the other side of the debris, where others were doing the same. They met the strangers, all volunteers not local to the area, at the converging end of the roadblocks, where they exchanged exhausted hugs and together continued to clear the roads elsewhere. More than a memory, that event, which was repeated all over the island by other volunteer groups & neighbors, is a testament of the power of compassion and solidarity that has been going down in Puerto Rico since Irma and María's back-to-back hits on the island.
During those meetings and the multiple activities that we were part of or hosted during my time in Puerto Rico, the Brigadistas were hard at work, although sometimes it might not have looked that way. There were days of hard physical labor, the usual imagery of what we think of when someone talks about "volunteering": clearing out trees, handing out supplies, long days under the sun. However, there were others where we spent the day cleaning the warehouse, organizing supplies, giving presentations at universities, and reaching out to community leaders to identify community-specific needs that extended beyond immediate relief. Service is not always momentous, but that should not be reason for questioning its purpose. Volunteering has many faces and I learned to appreciate and learn from each of them.
Part of the volunteers from the Brigada Solidaria del Oeste after completing a yard clean-up for María (second from the right), who has taken in more than 20 stray dogs into her home after the hurricane.
The BSO had been answering the call to action before the storm had left the island in its entirety. The name literally translates to "The Solidary Brigade of the West", and as the name implies, they are a group of volunteers from different municipalities of Porta del Sol, Puerto Rico's west side, where I was born and raised. Other than clearing roads and uniting forces with strangers, they had also been very active in all other relief efforts related to the state of emergency that all of Puerto Rico fell under after the storm. When I joined them in late November, more than two months after María, they were still receiving weekly shipments of emergency supplies, canned food, and first aid items. The mission, however, was to transition from the emergency state to a long-term self-sustainability movement, to educate and empower those communities forgotten by the government to find the means to sustain themselves the next time such a disaster hits... after all, a similar catastrophe may happen again this next hurricane season.
Efforts similar to the BSO's, championed by the Puerto Rican people, are widespread around the island. There is an uprising movement towards self-dependency and autonomy unlike anything I ever experienced while I lived there. The people are tired, disappointed, furious... with the federal and local government, with bureaucracy. Indeed, the living conditions post-hurricane María and the non-stop corruption and questionable actions by the government ignited the fire inside many Puerto Ricans to do one of two things: leave the island for good or take matters into their own hands. Those who've decided to stay, like the BSO members, my family, the Pura Energía team, the multiple community leaders and volunteers I met, etc., have rolled their sleeves and adopted the reconstruction/restoration efforts as an integral part of their life. They acknowledge they've lost many battles... but the war is not over. It's loyalty, grit, commitment, and love for the motherland like no other. It is my hope that I can find a way to love and care for Puerto Rico as much as these people do, even if from afar.
This picture, taken on December 14, 2017, shows the living spaces of people in need of shelter in an abandoned school turned refuge center in Maricao. This shelter was one of the locations where PRESI installed a fully autonomous solar system.
To be clear, I’m not saying the suffering is over. There were more than 250 suicides reported in Puerto Rico in 2017, a 20%+ increase from the previous year. For a population that generally doesn't care much for personal mental health, the spike in number of new patients seeking psychological and/or psychiatric services says a lot about the condition of people's psyche following the traumatic experience of living through the hurricane and (especially) its aftermath. A little over five months after the hurricanes, thousands still don't have power, and many lost their jobs. Communication blackouts are still frequent. There is a lot of work to do during this long road to full recovery.
"We need to take a break. We're humans too. We lived through the storm and have our own shit to deal with", said one of the brigadistas in another of our weekly plenarias. Some of these volunteers had resumed their "normal life", i.e. going to school, tending to their children and their schoolwork, working one or two jobs, and were still investing significant time in the relief efforts. At this point, Christmas was a week or so away. They needed some time for themselves.
Although riding the rollercoaster of life in Puerto Rico after María is a tough endeavor, Puerto Ricans have not lost their sense of gratitude and hospitality that is evident in any of us who carry the boricua bloodline. I noticed this the first day of working with the BSO, when Sandra (a BSO volunteer) asked an older lady how she was doing, is she had seeked shelter elsewhere. I soon learned the lady's roof had been blown away by the hurricane's ferocious winds.
"Yo tengo todo, soy bendecida. Tengo vida y tengo amigos. Lo único que necesito de ti es que contestes los mensajes que te envío por Facebook".
And it's not just me, as a Puerto Rican, saying these things. About 80 Dominion Energy linemen recently came back after a month or so working 14 hour days, 7 days a week, repairing power lines in mountainous areas of the island. Although they acknowledged destruction like nothing else they'd ever seen before, all of them came back with hearts (and bellies) full of the strength of the Puerto Rican spirit, which can withstand and rise again stronger than anything.
I guess Viktor Frankl was right.
“We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”