No place like home
After surviving Hurricane Maria, families left Puerto Rico and found homes in Milwaukee
Normally, it would have been a 10-minute drive across town.
But in the wake of Hurricane Maria late last September, nothing was normal in the island communities of Puerto Rico.
Francisco Cruz and his wife, Wanda Lebron, ventured out from their home in Humacao and spent two days trying to reach their daughter and son-in-law’s home. “Every tree and every pole” had been knocked onto the roads, Cruz recalled. “Every neighbor around us was out there with chain saws and machetes.”
Unknown to them, their daughter Frances and son-in-law Jorge Roman were working their way toward Cruz and his wife. Both couples wanted to make sure the other was all right.
“We met halfway,” Cruz said.
Last week, Cruz and his family marked an important step on a journey of a different sort. His son, Kemuel, was one of nine students at La Causa Charter School whose families fled Puerto Rico
and who last week completed their first year at their new school on Milwaukee’s south side.
“Their children’s education was one of the biggest concerns of people who left the island,” said Maria Ayala, director of education at La Causa. “They didn’t want to leave, but all the schools were closed. And they didn’t know when they would reopen.”
Cruz recalls the moment he was finally able to get a cellphone signal. “I had three hundred messages,” he said. And then he was finally able to connect with other relatives. “My father started crying when he heard my voice.”
The immediate devastation was followed by days of extreme hardship — food, water and gasoline shortages; no electricity; people getting sick from eating spoiled food.
The petroleum company where Cruz worked as a product inspector was closed, and Lebron no longer had access to the continuing medical care she needed after a successful battle against cancer.
Just weeks before winter, the family — Francisco and Wanda, Kemuel, Frances and Jorge — headed to Milwaukee, where Francisco’s brother lives.
In the months since then, Cruz has thought about moving back to what had been a seaside paradise where they were surrounded by family and familiarity.
“My brother, he put his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘No. I will help you. You can’t go back. There’s nothing down there.’ ”
Cruz determined the family’s only real option was to stay.
“I thought: I have nothing here. But I have everything. I have my family.”
La Causa’s connections
When the ferocity of Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, waves of fear swept through the offices and classrooms at La Causa.
The school’s connections to the island are strong; many of its 789 students and 119 staff members have family there, and information coming from the island was agonizingly slow.
“We had no way of contacting them to make sure they were OK,” said administrative assistant Jessica Cruz, Francisco’s sister-in-law.
“It was a very emotional time.” When thousands of Puerto Ricans made the decision to leave the island, La Causa made sure its doors were open to those who found their way to Milwaukee. It enrolled about 20 students from Puerto Rico through the winter.
“We knew they had left all of their friends and families and were facing all these major adjustments, culture shock,” Ayala said. “They had to learn a new language. Life is just so different here. The rules, expectations, everything is just so different for them. But because we are a bilingual school we could start teaching them in Spanish, so they didn’t lose a beat as far as their education.”
Their studies were augmented by 90 minutes of English lessons every day and a “newcomers club” to help them connect with other children from Puerto Rico.
Other family needs — like vouchers for school uniforms — were addressed Angel Osorio, 11, and Luis Osorio, 12, play video games in their sparse home on the south side of Milwaukee. They would like to return home to Puerto Rico.
by the school social worker or parent coordinator, Ayala said.
Eleven students eventually went back to the island with their families, she said. The rest remain.
“It’s extremely difficult to relocate, to leave their families, their friends, their things,” Ayala said. “The school community embraced these families.”
Flooding followed
Jynelsa Ruiz and her sons, Angel Osorio, 11, and Luis Osorio, 12, are among those staying.
During the hurricane, “I could hear electric poles falling to the ground or hitting people’s houses or fences. Sheets of aluminum were blowing off other houses and hitting my roof. I saw houses without roofs, people who lost their belongings,” Ruiz said.
“My house was concrete, but other houses that were made out of wood were completely gone,” she said.
Subsequent flooding swept in trash, debris and about 5 inches of water.
“Dirty water, you had to throw everything away,” Ruiz said. “You could see dead animals, frogs in your house. Anything the water would bring would get inside your house.”
When Ruiz decided to leave her home in Loíza, the boys’ school was being used as a shelter.
“My nieces and nephews studied (at La Causa) and my sister called there ahead of time when we were still in Puerto Rico,” Ruiz said.
She had the boys’ vaccination records and birth certificates, but not their school records, which were either lost or destroyed in the hurricane.
“La Causa admitted them anyway,” Ruiz said.
Ruiz had to leave her car with a relative because the bank that lent her the money to buy it wouldn’t allow her to take it off the island.
“I hope they’re making the payments,” she said.
Everything to nothing
The Cruz-Lebron family, including Frances and her husband, moved into the basement of Cruz’s brother and sister-in-law’s home near 38th Street and College Avenue.
“We had to hang blankets up to use for walls,” Lebron said. “I hated the feeling that we were imposing.”
Ruiz and her sons piled into her sister and brother-in-law’s home on the near
south side — and were joined by another sister-in-law who fled Puerto Rico with her three children.
Her sister and brother-in-law also have three children, so even with four bedrooms, the house was overwhelmed.
“My sister had to buy extra furniture and bunk beds,” Ruiz said.
The families exhausted their savings and ran up credit-card debt paying for airfare, winter clothes and eventually furniture. Wanda Lebron had to cancel her Medicaid benefits in Puerto Rico, reapply in Milwaukee and find a new oncologist.
“We went from having everything to having nothing,” Lebron said.
“One day my daughter and I both started crying and crying,” she continued. “I said to her, ‘I miss everything.’ This is so hard for us.”
Their hardships were compounded by a crushing homesickness and guilt for the misery of friends and relatives left behind.
During a visit to a Golden Corral restaurant, Lebron broke down while staring at the all-you-can-eat buffet.
“I started thinking of my family and whether they were getting food and water,” she remembered. “I thought, ‘What happened to my mom? Is she eating?’ ”
Finding jobs
Gradually, both families began to establish footholds in their new home city.
Francisco Cruz found a job through a temporary employment service at the Habitat for Humanity Restore in Walker’s Point, dropping off, picking up, cleaning and repairing donated merchandise. His son-in-law found a temp job at a pharmaceutical products company and his daughter found a job as a receptionist.
Ruiz, who had worked as an enrollment specialist for Delta Dental of Puerto Rico, enrolled in BadgerCare and FoodShare before finding part-time employment at a south side insurance company.
And their school tried to channel some of the angst they felt about the fate of friends and relatives back in Puerto Rico.
It joined a campaign by the American Federation of Teachers called “Operation Agua Every Drop Counts.” La Causa students — including Kemuel, Angel and Luis — joined students from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Somos Vecinos Quest Project raising several thousand dollars to purchase water purification filters for homes and schools on the island.
“Everybody who’s Puerto Rican has somebody in Puerto Rico that was affected by Hurricane Maria,” Ayala said.
“When you do something like Operation Agua you don’t know how many lives you’re touching.”
Getting out
A recent weekend with temperatures in the upper 80s reminded Ruiz of the island she left seven months ago, the warm weather’s return coinciding with a regained sense of stability.
Her part-time job has turned into full-time work as an insurance agent, working primarily with Spanish-speaking clients. She and her sons have moved into a three-bedroom apartment, she’s purchased new furniture and has her own car.
Angel and Luis are looking forward to summer trips to Wisconsin Dells, Six Flags Great America “and other places I can take them,” Ruiz said.
“I came here with just my luggage, but I think little by little I’ve been rebuilding,” she said.
“Sometimes I think about going back, but right now that’s not realistic. I’d have to start rebuilding again.”
Still, she admits her sons would go back “tomorrow.”
“Down there they rode horses and had chickens, kind of like their own little farm,” she said. “Now all they do is stay in the house and play video games.”
With their mother interpreting, the boys said they have made new friends in Milwaukee, but their mother is reluctant to let them out of the house on their own.
“I don’t feel like they should be on the street,” Ruiz said. “Down there everybody knows them. They know everybody. I felt safer for them. I knew their friends and their friends’ mothers.”
“Here I don’t know who they might be hanging out with.”
‘God in your life’
The Cruz-Lebron family has also moved into their own home, an apartment in Greendale.
Francisco’s temporary job at the Habitat Restore has become a new, permanent full-time job as the store’s assistant manager. Wanda has a new doctor and a new part-time job as a school food service worker.
They have new cars and a new church.
“When you have God in your life everything is good,” Jorge Roman said.
Fifth-grader Kemuel misses his friends on the island and the drum set he had to leave behind. But he’s made new friends at La Causa and has been learning robotics, something he said he’s always “dreamed of.”
He also plays soccer and was an announcer for the school’s Eagle News Network.
“La Causa is a good school,” he said. “I learned more English and for the summer I’m going to try to talk with my neighbors.”
Still, recent news that the death toll in their homeland was dramatically undercounted weighs on the families and on the La Causa community.
But even as a new Caribbean hurricane season begins, they harbor no anger for what some might see as God’s wrath.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Roman said. “And sometimes bad things happen for a reason.”