Puerto Ricans put survival skills to use
Residents stretch their creativity to the limit as they try to function without many modern amenities
More than a month after Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico on a path of destruction that spared no region, race or class, residents of the island have found their creativity stretched to the limit as they try to function without many amenities of the modern world.
It is not just water and electricity that are in scarce supply. Cellphone service ranges from spotty to nonexistent. Cars are damaged and roads blocked. For many, work and school still have not resumed, so they wander the streets, play board games and sit around telling stories by candlelight.
Crammed into homes three or four families at a time, living on canned and freeze-dried food without any means of turning it into a hot meal, and sleeping in shelters, Puerto Ricans have been learning to make do, sometimes in extreme ways.
A home in a tool shed
As the sun set in the shantytown of La Perla in Old San Juan, Ramón Marrero, 79, slumped onto the unwashed cot inside his brother’s tool shed, where he had lived since Maria claimed his home.
A single light bulb illuminated the other contents of the bare, musty room: two plastic chairs piled with clothes, canned fruit and vegetables, and a single gas burner.
Marrero, a community elder known to his neighbors as Don Ramón, draped a towel over his bare back to fend off the mosquitoes. Earlier, he had walked to the post office to charge his cellphone and mobile battery pack.
The only electricity he had seen since the storm came from an extension cord connected to a shared generator donated by Luis Fonsi, the Puerto Rican pop singer who filmed the video for the hit song “Despacito” in La Perla.
Marrero was hesitant to plug in the light bulb or his electric fan — only one could be used at a time — because he was afraid to overheat the machine or take energy from his neighbors.
Residents of the barrio say they were left to clear garbage and other debris on their own after the storm because municipal workers had failed to show up. Like Marrero, they were using fallen branches to fuel bonfires for cooking.
Lorel Cubano, the director of a local nonprofit, said most of the aid the neighborhood had received was from private citizens and celebrities like Fonsi. “The government hasn’t arrived here,” she said.
From good life to discomfort
The storm also revealed what had been carefully hidden cracks in the upper echelons of Puerto Rican society, which has been imploding during a decadelong recession.
Inside her two-story home with multiple balconies and a pool, Maria Julia Martinez’s stainlesssteel refrigerator, espresso machine and toaster oven have been gathering dust.
The family’s flooring business had tanked in recent years, and they could not use the appliances because they did not have $2,000 to fix their broken generator.
They have a much smaller generator that could support a couple of small appliances at a time, but to save gas money and prevent it from breaking down, the family runs the machine only at night. They use a propane camping stove and a barbecue to prepare food.
When Martinez’s husband cranked on the small generator one night last week, she ran off to do a couple of laundry loads on the efficiency cycle. Afterward, the entire family, including their pets, went to sleep on mattresses set up on the floor of their upstairs master bedroom. A small air-conditioning unit in the room provided a respite from the rest of their home.
“This is living in hell,” Martinez said. She acknowledged that despite their discomfort, her family was still much better off than most people on the island. “I feel bad for feeling bad.”
A new level of poverty
Inside the elementary school classroom that has become their temporary home, Iris Perez and her two adult daughters sat in plastic chairs, slapping mosquitoes on their exposed arms and legs and staring blankly, as if it was too hot to speak.
Like nearly half of Puerto Ricans, they had been living in poverty before the storm. But Maria swept away their ocean-side home and banished them to a new level of destitution.
This emergency shelter was better than the last; here there were showers, and the family had the classroom to itself.
Before, the women — along with Perez’s brother, son-in-law, and two young granddaughters — had slept next to other families and bathed with cups of water filled in the bathroom.
Nashali Reyes, Perez’s oldest daughter, was seven months pregnant and worried about contracting the Zika virus. Her 2-year-old daughter, Charyliz, bobbed around the classroom with a blanket and bottle in her hands, seemingly unbothered by the bug bites on her face even though she is allergic.
“It doesn’t matter what we do,” Reyes said, gesturing to a bottle of repellent. They had to keep the windows and doors open, they said, to maintain a livable, if extremely uncomfortable, temperature.
A message written on a whiteboard reminded them to keep their temporary home clean. “Welcome,” it said in Spanish, “May God bless you.”