Puerto Rican Women Fight the Curse of Maria – OZY

Five years ago today, Hurricane Maria attacked Puerto Rico with devastating force. For the next 16 hours, the Category 4 storm ripped through an island that was still reeling from the unwanted visitation of Hurricane Irma two weeks earlier. For the second time in a month, Puerto Rico has been devoured by the swirling green and red bands on meteorologists’ storm maps.

“Puerto Rico has completely disappeared from the radar,” remembers Mayor Cruz. “It was 16 hours of silence.”

When Cruz emerged from the shelter the next evening to assess the damage, she had to tie a rope around her waist and anchor herself to a car to protect herself from the final blows of the tailwinds. “I’ve never seen a war zone, but these images of wars that you see — the desolation, the silence — it was strange,” Cruz told OZY.

When Maria finally left and Cruz was able to venture out untethered, she began to grasp the extent of her island’s devastation. “I would like people to understand the scene,” she says; “There is no electricity; there is no communication; there is no water because people cannot pump water into their buildings. There are no elevators, so the buildings become human cages, especially for people with reduced mobility.

In the weeks following the natural disaster, a preventable tragedy began to unfold. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) response was woefully clumsy and ‘lacks a cohesive strategy’, according to a report by the House Oversight Committee. Adding insult to injury, then-President Donald Trump visited the island two weeks later and threw rolls of paper towels at the victims of the storm, like a cheerleader throwing t-shirts into the crowd at a basketball game.

But from the rubble of the tragedy emerged a group of community leaders who stepped forward to take matters into their own hands. The women organized, fed and comforted desperate families and helped put Puerto Rico back on its feet. Leading this effort were the women of Torres de Francia, a densely populated 15-story public housing project in San Juan.

When Maria cut the electricity grid, a group of women living in Torres de Francia sprang into action. They went door to door to check on everyone and gather supplies from fridges to organize a community kitchen – complete with cooking over an open fire over storm-dried wood – before the food spoiled. Once they crossed that reservation, the women approached Mayor Cruz asking for help from the relief donations that were arriving at the Roberto Clemente Stadium makeshift donation center.

“I remember the way Luz looked at me,” Cruz says of her first meeting with Torres de Francia community leader Luz Griselda Vasquez. “Most of the people we saw had given up – you could tell it in their eyes; they had this glassy look that looked at nothing. But Luz had this sharp, pointy look. I could tell she wasn’t going to give up; that she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I saw a part of myself in her. I saw a bit of my grandmother in her.

Vasquez says she only did what came naturally to her. “Resilience,” Vasquez says, thinking back to that day. “Maria will not be the last hurricane to pass over Puerto Rico. We are vulnerable to other hurricanes, earthquakes and pandemics. Resilience is therefore the key. If we weren’t resilient, we wouldn’t have recovered. We would never get up again.

Resilience was not an act of heroism, she insists. It was just a practical matter of doing what needed to be done. Fellow community leader Sujey Ocasio agrees. She says it was just women doing what women naturally do: lead. “That day we realized that men were following our lead,” Ocasio says with a laugh. “And that’s the truth. They follow us because we decide what needs to be done, and then they do it. But it’s not about being a hero or a boss, she says. It’s just about getting things done. “At a time when everyone is in need, there is no questioning who gets the credit for doing what,” says Ocasio, a mother of three. “You don’t think of yourself as a hero, you just think about how to help others.”

Aid is what they did, feeding some 600 families three meals a day for the next four months. The community kitchen in Torres de Francia has been so successful that it has become a model that has been replicated in 26 other neighborhoods around San Juan, bringing food and hope to tens of thousands of families.

“It’s not just a story of women cooking to feed people; it’s a story of women using food as a platform to redirect despair into hope, to redirect inertia into passion,” Cruz says. “They used food to engage and they engaged because they loved. They did what FEMA could not do.

The experience in Torres de Francia helped redefine Puerto Rico’s relationship with the rest of the world, Mayor Cruz said. “Communities started to understand that they had the strength within them and they didn’t need to look outside the community, because the heroes were there. These women were never gonna wait [for others to help].”

Instead, Cruz says, the women were determined to do the work themselves — and on their own terms. “I was the mayor of San Juan, but they told me how things were going to be in their community,” Cruz recalls. “The message was: if you’re here to help, you’re here to help on our terms. And it’s amazing. Sometimes we think helping people is giving them what we think they need, but really helping is being a platform for them to achieve what they need. So it was a totally different perspective.

This paradigm shift in humanitarian aid has spawned another San Juan initiative called Centers for Community Transformation, a series of solar-powered community centers where people can go during frequent power outages. the island to charge their phones, refrigerate medicine, receive first aid, or simply eat a family meal and drink clean water. “We’ve taken community empowerment to another level by giving them the key.”

Five years after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s reconstruction ‘still isn’t moving as fast as it should’, says one recent report by the United States Government Accountability Office, an independent branch of Congress. To date, the U.S. government has pledged $68.2 billion for Puerto Rico’s recovery and reconstruction, but so far has only spent $20.6 billion – mostly on emergency response. emergency rather than for the reconstruction of essential infrastructure such as schools and hospitals, according to the government agency. The island’s power grid also continues to flash with each storm, leaving more than one million people without electricity during heavy rains earlier this year. “My constituents are frustrated with the lack of progress – the most significant symbol of which is the continued instability of the power grid,” said Jenniffer González, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner in Washington, DC.

“People often ask me: So how are things in Puerto Rico? And of course, they hope for the right answer; they hope everything is fixed. The problem is, it’s the crisis that keeps on giving,” Cruz says. “A few weeks ago there was a power outage that left 200,000 people without electricity. Then, on September 18, hours before Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico, people started losing power again. My elderly parents were among them. Now the entire island nation of Puerto Rico is without power again. Over the past five years, reconstruction has not taken place with the sense of urgency it should have had and we are now seeing the devastating consequences.

If politicians had responded to Hurricane Maria with the same heart and fighting spirit as the women of Torres de Francia, Puerto Rico would be in a much better place today, Cruz says. “My grandmother used to say, ‘Did you start the fight?’ The answer had to be no. Then she would say, ‘Did you finish the fight?’ I learned that you can’t start the fight, but always finish it, no matter what the cost. You must complete the fight. And these women fight every day and these women fight through thick and thin. These women are fighting for their children and their community. They keep fighting and they keep hoping every day for change to come.

What lessons can we learn from the Hurricane Maria disaster? Will the United States be better prepared to react to the next natural disaster that will hit American soil?