All Hand, All Hearts, and Barranquitas

7 years ago I volunteered with All Hands as part of the disaster response to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. My time with them was something that was very special to me and I had shared the experience with a few friends. This year, one of those friends contacted me to say he was planning on going to Puerto Rico to volunteer with All Hands (Now All Hands and Hearts) to help with the damage from Hurricane Maria. At first, I think I drafted a nice response emailing telling him to do it since All Hands was such a great organization and, of course, the recovery in PR was a worthy cause, but somewhere along the way it dawned on me that maybe I should go too. 

Let me say, before all else, I was terrified to go. I'm an introvert. This would require spending 24/7 with 50+ individuals with near zero privacy among people and in a place I had no knowledge of and no control over, performing skills I had little business doing, for people I had little connection to other than our common humanity (certainly not a language or culture), but the pull was there. The weekend after my friend told me this I was watching the David Letterman interview with Barack Obama on David's new show and David said, "Nothing right in the world ever occurs without a fight." "Or at least some discomfort" Barack replies. "...that's why I always say that the way America has become more perfect, not perfect, but more perfect, typically has to do with ordinary people just sayin, you know what, that's not right." Well, I looked at this situation as I did with many others and thought, that's not right and I’ll take the discomfort to do something about it.

Arriving in Puerto Rico, I had a day and a half in San Juan before I was heading out to the base for work. I walked a lot around the city observing life and even in San Juan you could see some of the impact of Maria in empty houses and some broken down infrastructure. The morning of the third day I got a driver to head to the hills and valleys of central Puerto Rico where I would spend time in Barranquitas, an inland province of Puerto Rico. So inland, you can imagine, that most people from the capital never make it there even though it is just over an hour away. In fact, a co-volunteer had an experience where an uber driver stopped half way to the site and refused to go further away from San Juan. So driving to and arriving on base was a bit of an experience.  My driver was nice and chatted my ear off about every thing she could think of and an hour and a half later I was standing in a parking lot not knowing what came next, but sure enough there was the cross fit gym I’d been wondering about. 

The Base for the All Hands and Hearts operation sits on a windy road just about a mile outside of the county seat of Barranquitas. The building itself is two stories tall with one story containing two smaller rooms of bunk beds and one washer dryer set (for all of us!). The upper half of the building contains the cross fit gym, the kitchen we use, a dining/meeting area and bunks for about 40 people. 

The kitchen is communal, breakfast and lunch are up to us, but food stuffs are provided. Dinner is provided by a local woman who comes to cook food the base has bought and it was simple stuff, but delicious. Bunks were made by the all hands staff and air mattresses are used by participants. The space between bunks is about 3ft, so enough for 2 people to pass, but not much more. Add to that all the bags and other crap people had gathered around their bunk and some parts were unnavigable. The first night trying to sleep was a quite funny experience, with 40 people either snoring, accidentally flashing lights from phones, whispering to each other, moving around on their creaky air mattress, and an assortment of other noises competing with the frogs, crickets, and passing traffic sounds coming through the open windows. I chuckled a few times, what can you do but laugh at the absurdity of some moments? There are two bathrooms off the main area, two porta pots outside, and a built plywood outdoor shower with 4 stalls. To have a moment of peace to use the toilet or shower was rare and you can imagine with 40 people that quite a few got up in the night to bang the bathroom door shut and let the lights shine brightly on all who were sleeping. Honestly though, other than the first night I slept like a rock since I was so tired from working in the day that all banging and lights didn’t phase me.

 

Work days started when the cross fit gym opened at 6am. No need for an alarm as the music and the sounds of dropping weights were enough to rouse us. By 630 mostly people were up making breakfast, packing lunches, using the bathroom and then dressed and ready to go at the trucks by 730. Then our smaller teams would discuss what tools were needed for the day and get them from the communal shed. My team leader was Addie, a slightly older woman who’d been at base for about a month with two weeks left to go. Along with her and 6-8 others we headed to the same house each day. Every team had something slightly different, either attaching corrugated iron to wooden roofs, cleaning or sealing concrete roofs, or possibly something else. The major theme was, roofs. Either build them or fix them. By the time I arrived on base, about 6 months after the first volunteers came, about 50 roofs had been fixed or constructed. We were told that it takes about 15 to 25,000 usd per roof in materials and manpower (the food for us).

  

We arrived at Miranda’s house each morning where usually Miranda had already left for work and her parents, Amerigo and Wanda would either be on the porch or just inside waiting for us. Hugs and kisses would be next and then our Spanish speaker would tell them what our plan was for the day. I’d say hello to Linda, the Chihuahua as well.

We’d then haul our gear up to the roof and do some morning stretches while talking about what needed to be done. The first day I arrived Miranda had a new cast on her arm. Apparently she slipped and broke her arm the day before when there were rains and water leaked into the house. In addition, mold was beginning to grow in places on the inner walls of the house. It was not a healthy place for people to be living.

Our roof took a lot of chipping away of old sealant, caulking of cracks, cementing cracks and corners, and then finally a new coat of seal before completion. Unfortunately, the roof was a day or two away from completion when I left, so I didn’t get to have that pleasure, but all the same I know my hours sitting on that roof will give the family a dry house. The night I was there it rained hard and we were all worried that again their house would be flooded, but because of some of the base layers we had already put down when we arrived the house was dry. Amerigo was very keen to tell us and a few of our team members shed tears at the thought of having reached our goal, though not full completion of the roof, yet

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Work on the roof was hard. I’m not a handyman and I’m not used to laboring all day, nor being in the hot and humid Puerto Rico climate. Each day I felt good to be doing something that serves others, but by golly did my body hurt. My muscles in my back and knees ached, my hands were sore the whole time, I got numerous blisters and sores from sitting, bug bites from just being in the tropics, chemical burns, sunburns, etc. During lunch I would lie flat on the concrete porch of Miranda’s house as it was flat and hard and made my back feel like new again for after lunch work.

At 4pm each day we would start packing up our tools, inform Amerigo and Wanda what we had done that day, a couple kisses on the cheek from Addie to them, and we were headed back to base. There we would unload our gear, race for the showers to beat other teams, and be in the dining hall for a meeting at 530pm. There each team would give an update from the day, general news would be told, and anyone leaving would be asked to give a speech, if they liked. Many speeches were similar, but not less genuine, expressions of gratitude to all present and the work done. After we would have dinner and then a few hours before quiet hours started at nine with lights out at ten and final curfew at eleven. Then the symphony of creaks, crickets, whispers and snoring would start all over again. Each day, just like this. Dirty and tiring and beautifully satisfying in its simplicity.

The day I left base I went around to a few of the volunteers I had come to know, including my team leader Addie, sharing hugs and tears. After saying goodbye and leaving the base room for contemplation began. Originally in San Juan and at base too, I questioned how daily life in Puerto Rico could continue for some people while their neighbors were in need. How could all these buff dudes come do cross fit while roofs needed repairing? Well, the answer to that is pretty simple. They were continuing with their lives, as we all do, even when there was need around them. As I too was doing by returning to my normal life. 

It is hard to put down normal life to reach out to someone. In the mainland and certainly where I live in China there is poverty and there are people that need help, but how often do we put down our normal lives to help them? The feeling among Puerto Ricans is that the US has forgotten them now that the sensationalism of the hurricanes initial impact has gone. Although the US government did come to give disaster relief initially, the depth and duration was not enough. Initially the lives lost were estimated to be about 65, but since then the estimate has risen to about 2,500 (I’ve seen some estimates as high as 4,500, but can’t find a lot of support for that number). Think about that 2,500 number for a moment. Compare that to the flooding in Houston. That storm killed 15. What about Katrina in New Orleans? That hurricane killed about 1,800. Put in context, the discussion around and response to Maria has been oddly muted and most feel it is because Puerto Rico is a territory not a state, where people are US citizens, but don’t have rights to vote or be represented in the US government (so why should the US government care much about them?). Because of Maria and a number of other conditions, a record number of Puerto Ricans have decided to move, mostly to the US mainland and mostly to the east coast, in Florida and New York especially. Some estimates are that there are just as many Puerto Ricans living outside of as in the territory.

While working, Addie would often ask us if we were ok, how we were doing. Most of the volunteers are younger and chirpy and responded as you’d imagine, but being a bit older and wiser (and more tired) I would just shrug and say, “Well, you know, I’m fine”, and she would look at me with these tired and understanding eyes with a little smirk to say, yeah, me too. Because we were fine and that was something to ponder as we stood on a roof in Barranquitas.

The whole experience has left me a bit frayed, physically and emotionally. A few people along the way have expressed gratitude that I volunteered my time or said that I’m a great guy for doing this, but I wonder how much that is true. I feel like a bit of a fraudster. I fly in, do my time, and fly out, but what have I really given?

There is a parable that I can barely remember from being a youngster in church, something along the lines of a yearly tithe that is given and what the value is. One man gives a chest of gold while one woman gives two pennies. The question is who is making the greater gift? Well, it is the poor woman, not the rich man, who is giving something that has a greater value to her than the man’s chest of gold does to the man.

I can’t, or at least currently I’m not willing, to give it all up and go on a crusade to help people. But having an experience like I just did leaves you with that feeling, that if only we all did more for others it would help others and ourselves. Wouldn’t the world be a better place? Couldn’t I give more time? More money? What am I willing to give, two pennies or a chest of gold?