Story by Kiana Cole
Hill Brothers, PUERTO RICO – Beyond the debris-free beaches of San Juan, past the hotels huffing on generators and outside the bubble of air-conditioned restaurants, there is Hill Brothers, a community just 10 miles south with little cell service, less water and no power.
As Carmen Villanueva watches progress in the capital after Hurricane Maria destroyed the island on Sept. 20, she sees the streets of Hill Brothers – her home since she was an infant – still lined with garbage, houses sliced in half from the hurricane’s violent winds, if not obliterated entirely. It’s what always happens, she said: the tourism center of the island gets prioritized after a destructive storm.
But not enough is being done around the rest of the island, Villanueva said.
So she decided to take matters into her own hands.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency offers families displaced by the destruction $500 to repair their homes, but they must fill out an application available online or over the phone – but many people have no internet or cell service.
So Villanueva got out her keys to the community center, a small cement building crammed with water bottles and granola bars. Decades ago, she was one of the activists who sat on the ground to protest politicians’ initial decision not to build it. Now, she needed it to help her community get the relief funding they were desperate for.
She recruited her neighbor, 17-year-old Ediel Rodriguez, to advertise her idea: a day dedicated to completing the applications with no phones or internet.
Rodriguez set off immediately. “FEMA!” he cried through the battered streets, stepping around uprooted trees and fallen telephone poles. “Fill out your forms for FEMA!”
Soon dozens, then hundreds of neighbors arrived at the center.
With the help of her children and close friends, Villanueva began taking handwritten notes of everyone’s needs, assembling applications to submit later on their behalf, once she drove to get WiFi in the center of San Juan.
The event stretched into two days because of how many people turned out, with residents from neighboring communities taking part, too. In total, Villanueva submitted applications for more than 500 families.
Eight weeks after the hurricane, those first few days feel like 100 million years ago, she said.
The condition of her community, which is made up of about 4,000 people, is not unusual for Puerto Rico in the aftermath of back-to-back hurricanes Irma and Maria. Though water and telecommunications services are steadily increasing, only 57 percent of the island has power as of Nov. 27, according to data from the Puerto Rican government.
“There’s a new normal,” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz said. “You say that things are getting better, because they were so horrible before, that even the smallest change makes you say that things are better.”
As the days after the hurricane went on, and Villanueva continued to see her community’s needs go unaddressed, she decided to launch a blog, “Desde mi Parcela” – From my Plot – with the help of her friend Stephanie Camacho, dedicated to speaking up on behalf of her neighbors.
“It’s not making it easier, it’s just that nobody was doing it,” Villanueva said.
On one shelf of the community center, a sign peeks through piles of canned tunas and vegetables: “Mi gratitud habla…cuando me preocupo por los demas…” – “My gratitude speaks … when I care about others…”
That’s how Villanueva is, Camacho said – she’s herself when she’s caring for others.
“She is the heart of the community,” Camacho said. “And she helps make visible not only this community, but other communities that are in need where the voices are not heard.”
For Villanueva, her actions were borne of the government’s inaction, she said. And as devastating as the storm has been for her and her community, Hurricane Maria was, in a strange way, a blessing: “It revealed the real poverty of Puerto Rico,” she said.
Now, all there’s left to do is rebuild.
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