Provides basics for her hard-hit nabe

SALINAS, P.R. — On fences and walls across the Las Mareas neighborhood of Salinas, the 800 number for FEMA is scrawled in spray paint.

Jacqueline put it there.

“It was like something to hang on to,” she told the Daily News. “At least, have FEMA’s phone. That was what I did for them, because I didn’t know how to start helping. That was the first thing I did three or four days after Maria, I spray-paint FEMA’s phone everywhere I could.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency finally arrived in the southern Puerto Rican city last Thursday. The agency has since taken on eight cases, according to the 53-year-old Vazquez-Suarez.

Since Hurricane Maria hit the island Sept. 20, Vazquez-Suarez has kept busy: cooking, gathering and delivering supplies, setting up free flea markets and barbershops in the city where tiny homes — including two across the street from her own that had housed her sons and their families — were ripped apart by rising waters and brutal winds.

“I don’t see nobody from FEMA. Only some soldiers. They come with some waters and some prepared meals,” neighborhood resident Juan Suarez, 43, said, adding there have been long lines and little food in the supermarkets. “And Jacqueline, every day, she finds something to give to them, to all the people.”

On Saturday, she delivered food to Suarez, but she also brought along something new: water filters, taken to the island by New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who explained in Spanish how to use them at each stop.

Vazquez-Suarez didn’t criticize FEMA. Instead, she said the agency was probably overwhelmed with hurricane relief in other places like Texas and Florida, and that her town wouldn’t be selfish.

But Mark-Viverito was sparing.

“My job, and using the platform and my voice, is to say that the response has been insufficient and inadequate and that we deserve more,” said Mark-Viverito, who led a delegation of Council members to the area. “Las Mareas deserves respect, and they should be able to live in dignity. And some of these conditions are very challenging.”

A FEMA spokesman said the agency has received 9,326 registrations in the larger area of Salinas. The agency said it had just one case on file for Las Mareas, but because people often use the name of the larger municipality when filing paperwork, the actual number for the neighborhood could be higher.

Mark-Viverito and VazquezSuarez had never met before, nor had Vazquez-Suarez ever heard Vazquez-Suarez less of the Council speaker — she’d simply been asked by a friend if she could use help from some New Yorkers and gladly took it. But the two were delighted to find they have something in common: Vazquez-Suarez, a former janitor, is the president of the Salinas municipal legislature, while Mark-Viverito leads the comparable body in New York.

“You know something, having a woman up there in New York — and a Puerto Rican — that is awesome,” Vazquez-Suarez said.

Las Mareas, sandwiched between two lakes, was inundated during Maria, and VazquezSuarez said it’s been raining nearly every day since. Its gutters, streets and grassy areas are filled with standing water, a breeding ground for mosquitoes that can carry diseases like the Zika virus.

“You can’t find repellent anywhere,” said Fernando SilvaCaraballo, director of the Institute of Sciences for Conservation. “You need to have a mosquitero, a mosquito net.”

His group helped start the “Three Mosquiteers” — a trio of areas, including Las Mareas, where volunteers make mosquito nets. He enlisted several of the New York City Council members in the work of tying up yards of mesh nets into usable canopies.

The mosquitoes are just one aspect of the pestilence the storm brought to areas like Las Mareas. Vazquez-Suarez said people are getting sick, and those who are already ill can’t get access to treatment, including dialysis, which has been rationed.

Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez of Manhattan said a diabetic member of his extended family died in the days after Maria due to a lack of medicine in a hospital in Bayamon, outside San Juan.

“And those deaths are not counted,” he said.

“The conditions and how the people are right now are living are getting worse and worse,” Silva-Caraballo said. “People are getting sick, and not because of the winds. Because of the aftermath, OK? The distortion of the services and the facilities, so people start dying faster.”

It’s through Silva-Caraballo that Mark-Viverito and the Council members came to visit Las Mareas.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research on what groups are out there and this one was recommended to me,” the Council speaker said, adding that SilvaCaraballo’s wife works with her mother. “His idea is that you have to really hit and work with communities on the ground that are in need that are maybe getting overlooked.”

There are few generators but otherwise no power in Las Mareas — which has about 300 homes — more than 50 days after the hurricane. Smaller wooden homes, like the ones that be-