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It was day five and in the way the highway flooded, it was impossible to get out of town. Still raining in the mountain range kept water torrentially flowing down to the valleys. Things began stirring up in town when people finally got out of their houses and neighborhoods, in the way they could, those, the most affected ones, in needs of help. I live in a relatively privileged area in terms of central location. Hospital is three minutes in car, the same way police department, schools and the mall. None of those working though, but still we've got all possible places nearby if we needed something.
Coliseum had been opened as the first response center. Roughly five minutes from home, I told my husband to go there to serve as volunteers while we could go back to work. Adding that hubby worked for the apiculture industries, it's obvious he'd had no job for a few months until hives were fully recovered, as all were devastated. Vegetation down, odd were against agriculture all in all. So we went to the coliseum and began our work.
I helped collecting data from the thousands of persons affected in someway or another by the hurricane while hubby organized filing people in terms of urgency in groups or rows. It was a heartbreaking experience, as I recall writing more than two or three hundred times the phrase "total loss". Those people had lost everything they had. Nothing had left standing for them. No house, clothes, food... they've lost their vehicles, medicines. Most of them arrived wearing what they had on when hurricane Maria hit, snatching all their belongings with it. My eyes watered more than once to hear horrible stories of how the roofs blew off while they were inside their house. How water flooded everything damaging electrical and furniture.
Histories of survival were told and retold while I managed not to cry, to give them a word of consolation. It was hard to swallow every time the lump knotting in my throat with every new anecdote. Once again, I felt lucky. I'd lost nothing. I didn't have to fight to survive, or to save a relative from the raging winds or the force of water. My house was intact. I was alive.
Amongst those people I attended, there was a group of men that arrived around mid morning. Two young male and a third one maybe in his fifties. "Can you give us water?" Was the first thing he said. He looked all sweaty and tired. What he told me, his story, is something I'll never forget.
The three of them came walking from the very central region, deep in the mountains, barrio called Rio Prieto. That's more than fifteen kilometers curving narrow and steep roads, up and down mountains and hills. They were farm men who'd lost everything: house and crops. Their houses, small and fragile wooden structures were ripped off by the one hundred and fifty miles blowing gusts. For five days, they'd managed to survive in their community, shifting turns in guarding every night in front of what was left of their homes to prevent from robbers to steal the little they had.
Without any source of communication, they were completely isolated in that region. They had to walk their way to the city. Mudslides had blocked main and secondary rural access. While one f the men's wife was seven months pregnant, they had to give it a try. They needed help for around fifty families stranded in that area: food, water, medicines and to take that lady to a hospital to give birth at any moment.
Like that, there were many similar stories around the island. While we could see or find some sort of a life trying to find its path towards normality in the cities amidst chaos, there was a total different story evolving in the countryside. Isolation, despair, impotence, hunger, extreme devastation, death, and there's no way to get to those people immediately. Two sides of the same coin, one was as dark as the subsequent nights without electricity, without hopes.
***Three days after, FEMA took over intensive care unit in the city hospital. It has collapsed. No power or oxygen to run the unit forced the extreme decision. That was something I never expected to see in my life.
*As I write this part it's day 92 after María. Still half of our island it's without electricity. People still struggle to survive. This has not been easy for us. I've been lucky enough to live near the hospital in town, the first thing to be restored electricity on October 8. Please, keep us in your prayers. There's so much to be done. And while state and federal governments play cards to whom they give contracts to rebuild infrastructure, three million people is still suffering. While federal government increases the cost of what comes into our island, people in the mountains lack of food, running water and road access. History as we know it in Puerto Rico is to be defined as before or after Maria.
