The island of Puerto Rico has experienced many tropical storms and hurricanes. In the time of my immediate family has been living there, they had experienced short power outages lasting for maybe a night or two as a result of the weather. But when we got news that the Level 4 Hurricane Maria was heading for the island we knew this was a totally different kind of storm.
My mother and I call my dad, brother, and grandmother in Puerto Rico on an almost daily basis. The conversation topics usually aren’t anything too important: “What’d you have for dinner?” “What are you doing today?” “Your cousins mandan saludos and ask when you’re coming down to visit.”
In the days leading up to Maria, we still had our regular conversations but now including questions like “Do you have enough food and water?”
The phone call on the night before the storm hit ended with my dad telling my mother not to worry. That was the first time he ever ended a call that way.
When we put the phone down, we didn’t realize that that would be the last time we would hear his voice, or my brother or grandmother’s, for a month.
On the morning of September 20, 2017, the island of Puerto Rico was ravaged. Three million people lost water and electricity. Communication was severed.
News from the island was sparse. We relied on news coverage from mainland American reporters who had flown to the island to assess the damages themselves. But they were all around the capital of San Juan.
Puerto Rico is about the size of Connecticut, and my family lives on the opposite end from the capital, in a city called Yauco. Because they are so far away from the capital reporters couldn’t get there to tell anyone anything. We had no idea about my family’s situation.
I took to Twitter to see if people who also had relatives in that are had more information than I did. The ‘Puerto Rico’ search tag was full of others worrying about their loved ones on the island.
And then, in the same search, it was impossible to miss the insensitive tweets from the President. “They want everything done for them!” he said. He insulted the mayor of San Juan. The same media platform I was using to find solidarity with others in my situation was the one he used to degrade and mock my people in the middle of a tragedy.
I tried to block out political messages. I focussed on my family. I sat with my phone facing up in every class. I obsessively opened the home screen hoping for a text or call. I couldn’t concentrate on anything.
Shortly after arriving home from school on October 11, my phone rang and the caller ID read “Papi”. My hands shook as I tried to answer. I let out a wavering “Hello?” before hearing the voice of my younger brother distantly calling back, “Hello? Mari, can you hear me?”
The connection was terrible, the glimmer of hope of finally being able to talk to them started to fade. I shouted back that I could hear as if me getting louder would somehow help. Knowing they were on the other line and they couldn’t hear me was torture. My brother said that they’d try again to see if they could get a better signal and hung up. The time between the calls felt like an eternity compared to the half a minute it actually was.
The second phone call was successful. My eyes were full of tears as the phone was passed along from my brother to my grandmother, and then to my father. They updated me on their conditions: they had water but they were still waiting for electricity. All my daily worries seemed so small when they were lacking the most basic needs. I felt guilty.
Most public schools on the island were closed due to power and water outage. My brother David, who was a junior in high school then, said his school was running on half day schedules, making use of the sunlight to illuminate the classrooms. But tunning water service was spotty, so when the water stopped, the children were sent home.
I recently asked my brother, “After the hurricane, was the experience at school different?” He said, “Even though my school was able to open earlier than most, many students were missing because they either had no way of knowing that classes had started, or they were unable to make their way to the school due to the conditions. The teachers were unable to give their usual formal lessons due to the amount of students missing and because of their own situation.”
A few weeks ago, out of the blue, Trump started tweeting about Puerto Rico again, calling our government “grossly incompetent” and saying “Their government can’t do anything right, the place is a mess–nothing works.”
He’s wrong. I try to block him out as usual. Things do work. I can hear my family’s voices now.
While Trump screams at the world one way through the internet, my mother and I call my dad, brother, and grandmother every day and the topics remain the same: “What’d you have for dinner?” “What are you doing today?” But now when we hang up the phone, we feel intense gratitude that we can speak at all. We will never take communication for granted.
