SALINAS, P.R. — On fences and walls across the Las Mareas neighborhood of Salinas, the
800 number for FEMA is scrawled in spray paint.
Jacqueline Vazquez-Suarez put it there.
“It was like something to hang on to,” she told the Daily News. “At least, have FEMA’s phone. That was what I did for them, because I didn’t know how to start helping. That was the first thing I did three or four days after Maria, I spray-paint FEMA’s phone everywhere I could.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency finally arrived in the southern Puerto Rican city last Thursday. The agency has since taken on eight cases, according to the 53-year-old Vazquez-Suarez.
Since Hurricane Maria hit the island Sept. 20, Vazquez-Suarez has kept busy: cooking, gathering and delivering supplies, setting up free flea markets and barbershops in the city where tiny homes — including two across the street from her own that had housed her sons and their families — were ripped apart by rising waters and brutal winds.
“I don’t see nobody from FEMA. Only some soldiers. They come with some waters and some prepared meals,” neighborhood resident Juan Suarez, 43, said, adding there have been long lines and little food in the supermarkets. “And Jacqueline, every day, she finds something to give to them, to all the people.”
On Saturday, she delivered food to Suarez, but she also brought along something new: water filters, taken to the island by New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who explained in Spanish how to use them at each stop.
Vazquez-Suarez didn’t criticize FEMA. Instead, she said the agency was probably overwhelmed with hurricane relief in other places like Texas and Florida, and that her town wouldn’t be selfish.
But Mark-Viverito was less sparing.
“My job, and using the platform and my voice, is to say that the response has been insufficient and inadequate and that we deserve more,” said Mark-Viverito, who led a delegation of Council members to the area. “Las Mareas deserves respect, and they should be able to live in dignity. And some of these conditions are very challenging.”
A FEMA spokesman said the agency has received 9,326 registrations in the larger area of Salinas. The agency said it had just one case on file for Las Mareas, but because people often use the name of the larger municipality when filing paperwork, the actual number for the neighborhood could be higher.
Mark-Viverito and Vazquez-Suarez had never met before, nor had Vazquez-Suarez ever heard of the Council speaker — she’d simply been asked by a friend if she could use help from some New Yorkers and gladly took it. But the two were delighted to find they have something in common: Vazquez-Suarez, a former janitor, is the president of the Salinas municipal legislature, while Mark-Viverito leads the comparable body in New York.
“You know something, having a woman up there in New York — and a Puerto Rican — that is awesome,” Vazquez-Suarez said.
Las Mareas, sandwiched between two lakes, was inundated during Maria, and Vazquez-Suarez said it’s been raining nearly every day since. Its gutters, streets and grassy areas are filled with standing water, a breeding ground for mosquitoes that can carry diseases like the Zika virus.
“You can’t find repellent anywhere,” said Fernando Silva-Caraballo, director of the Institute of Sciences for Conservation. “You need to have a mosquitero, a mosquito net.”
His group helped start the “Three Mosquiteers” — a trio of areas, including Las Mareas, where volunteers make mosquito nets. He enlisted several of the New York City Council members in the work of tying up yards of mesh nets into usable canopies.
The mosquitoes are just one aspect of the pestilence the storm brought to areas like Las Mareas. Vazquez-Suarez said people are getting sick, and those who are already ill can’t get access to treatment, including dialysis, which has been rationed.
Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez of Manhattan said a diabetic member of his extended family died in the days after Maria due to a lack of medicine in a hospital in Bayamon, outside San Juan.
“And those deaths are not counted,” he said.
“The conditions and how the people are right now are living are getting worse and worse,” Silva-Caraballo said. “People are getting sick, and not because of the winds. Because of the aftermath, OK? The distortion of the services and the facilities, so people start dying faster.”
It’s through Silva-Caraballo that Mark-Viverito and the Council members came to visit Las Mareas.
“I’ve been doing a lot of research on what groups are out there and this one was recommended to me,” the Council speaker said, adding that Silva-Caraballo’s wife works with her mother. “His idea is that you have to really hit and work with communities on the ground that are in need that are maybe getting overlooked.”
There are few generators but otherwise no power in Las Mareas — which has about 300 homes — more than 50 days after the hurricane. Smaller wooden homes, like the ones that belonged to Vazquez-Suarez’s sons, are now only foundations, a scene reminiscent of bungalows toppled in New York after Hurricane Sandy.
“It’s like living déja vu all over again,” said Councilman Donovan Richards of Queens, recalling personal belongings strewn on the streets of the Rockaways. “It’s a very emotional trip. But as someone who has lived through this, I understand that the cavalry is not going to come. The cavalry begins with the people from the community.”
Dogs — some stray, some collared, some skinny, all friendly — wander the roads. A wet golden retriever ran up protectively alongside two young boys riding a bicycle and scooter. There has been no school for older children since the storm, while their building is used as a shelter.
Kiara Rios, 15, lived in the Bronx until about six years ago, when she moved to a nearby area in Salinas.
Last week she was volunteering, riding in Vazquez-Suarez’s pickup, in part to get community service credits for school — even though school is closed.
“I mostly did it because this is my island, and why wouldn’t I do it?” she asked. “It’s Puerto Rico. It’s not going to stay down. It’s going to come right back up.”
Some students have left town, Vazquez-Suarez said, “to get a chance — because there’s really nothing here after Maria.”
Older people, too, have left, she said, many unwillingly. Their families have sent for them, knowing there is no power, and she feared many would be sent to nursing homes rather than to live with relatives.
“They know that they will not come back,” said Rodriguez, the councilman. “Many of them, they were also Puerto Ricans who lived in the United States, who came back for their retirement. And now they see that they have to go back to the United States.”
Vazquez-Suarez is one of many Puerto Ricans whose family had lived in New York in the past. She got her first name, Jacqueline, when her mother, who spoke little English, saw Jacqueline Kennedy in a newspaper.
But she, like many others in Las Mareas, has no intention of leaving her home — especially with so much work to be done.
“Governments and Presidents can’t say that Puerto Rico is sitting on their ass,” she said. “We are working. We are working. And most of the communities are doing what we are doing.”
