Students collect, deliver supplies to Puerto Rico
UC Berkeley’s Pablo Paredes heads effort to help Hurricane Maria victims
BERKELEY >>
Frustrated by what they see as a lack of support for hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, a group of UC Berkeley students last week collected more than 300 pounds of supplies for the island.
Early Saturday morning, ethnic studies major Pablo Paredes, who lived in Puerto Rico for several years as a child, boarded a plane with five suitcases full of water filters, mosquito netting and other donations for victims of Hurricane Maria — and flew to the island to personally deliver them to Casa Pueblo, a relief organization.
“If the relief effort doesn’t get very serious, very quickly, and this political garbage doesn’t get moved out of the way, we’re going to have epidemics,” Paredes said in a statement. “And that’s very scary.”
Nearly two months after the hurricane battered the island, more than half of the island’s 3.4 million residents still don’t have power, and some people still lack access to safe drinking water. On Friday, Puerto Rico’s emergency management director resigned, even as President Donald Trump has praised the federal government’s response to the disaster.
A lot of us in the diaspora have realized the only way to really reach the folks who are really on the edge right now is to do it yourself,” Paredes said.
Paredes is working with a group of graduate students called Boricuas in Berkeley. The group hosted a dinner and music benefit after the hurricane that generated more than $7,000 for relief efforts. The organization will host another event in December.