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My Journey

When Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, I’m sure we were all worried, surprised, maybe even scared. But for me, I was all of those feelings and more. I’m Puerto Rican and still have family that live on the island. No electricity, flooding, the damage, I was scared for them. Being acutely aware of the financial crisis happening in Puerto Rico right now, and the less than favorable comments from our current presidential administration, I wasn’t sure how recovery would look on the island. It has been just over a year since Maria touched down in Puerto Rico, and there is still much work to be done.

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16 FEMA DECLARED

EMERGENCIES IN 2017

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Over this past year, I have followed the news and the controversy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) work on the ground. I was convinced that the federal government was not doing enough to help the people of Puerto Rico. Hurricanes tore through Texas and Florida, wildfires were spreading through California, Carmen Cruz, mayor of San Juan, was on the news every day saying 45 was letting people die in Puerto Rico, and the perception was that stateside emergencies were all receiving greater and quicker aid than the people of Puerto Rico. It felt as though every other emergency that had happened received a much more concise and efficient recovery process, while Puerto Rico just waited for someone to pay more attention to her. Could you blame me for feeling this way? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the paper towel fiasco?

Everything that I was being shown through our news and the struggle my family was still going through on the island, led me to believe that the recovery process in Puerto Rico was truly a disaster. I was angry. And to be honest, I couldn’t really tell you why I was angry. I didn’t take it upon myself to look further into the recovery process in Puerto Rico. I didn’t take it upon myself to find the truth, I just ran with everything I was seeing in the media. That’s not to say that the media was lying to us, but rather they just weren’t sharing the full story…maybe because they didn’t have it?

“Every death is horrible, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous — hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” 

- President Trump, October 3, 2017

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This semester I was able to participate in one of the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs Studio classes at The New School. The Worst and Best Practices in Humanitarian Aid Studio focuses on selecting an intervention of aid and critiquing it as either a form of best or worst practice in their field. I instantly knew that I would select the disaster relief efforts in Puerto Rico as my project. When I started this project, I had little knowledge of how FEMA operated and made assumptions that Puerto Rico was not getting the same amount of care that states would have and do receive during their emergencies. I went into this project with the intent of finding out all of the things FEMA was doing wrong and coming up with solutions on how they can do it better.

 

Well, little did I know, that I knew nothing. Let me explain. I spent the first several weeks attempting to find out any and all information on what FEMA was doing on the island through their website. Not only was it incredibly hard to locate this information, but it was also very hard to understand anything that was on FEMA’s website. I felt like I really didn’t know anything about what was actually happening. What was the difference between response and recovery? Why are there so many public assistance programs? Who’s picking and vetting the contractors that are being picked to do work?

"I KNEW NOTHING"

This led me to do some research on people I could interview. I needed answers because the website wasn’t giving me any. I started by speaking with a contractor who had worked with FEMA while in Puerto Rico. They gave me incredible information that really shed light on what the true work of FEMA is. Additionally, they helped me to see that FEMA’s job is not to be able to rebuild an entire state (or in this case, an island). They simply don’t have the resources to do so, so instantly I’ve been shown how the disaster in Puerto Rico is a very special case. Puerto Rico was completely devastated. FEMA had not been prepared for something like this, especially not while there were emergency declarations being made in California, Texas, and Florida all at the same time.

 

I was then able to finally get in touch with someone from FEMA who was willing to answer my questions. Everyone that I had reached out to either never responded, or simply stated they were too busy with other work and I should refer to the website. After speaking with a FEMA official, the entire recovery process was put into perspective for me. There is so much information that the public didn’t have that pertained to how the disaster was handled in Puerto Rico. Information that I would argue the public needed to know.  I was stunned to find out that new regulations were placed on the recovery process in Puerto Rico due to the economic crisis on the island. I was surprised to find out that FEMA does, in fact, stops providing emergency supplies because if they did not it would hurt the local economy. That makes sense, but who knew that a bureaucracy like FEMA was even paying attention to things like that. I was grateful to find out that although FEMA had released a newer and better version of the public assistance program just mere weeks before Hurricane Maria landed in Puerto Rico, they made an executive decision to continue using the older methods so that applicants requesting aid did not have to learn an entire new system while simultaneously dealing with a crisis. FEMA was doing some good things, and the public had no idea about any of it.

"I was grateful"

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That isn’t to say that I have now drastically changed my position and am walking around praising FEMA as the best thing since sliced bread. They definitely have a lot of work to do to be labeled as best practice, but I’ve come to see that they may not have been as bad as I had assumed. This project gave me the opportunity to really understand what the recovery process looks like during a disaster. I went from being completely angry and skeptical about FEMA’s work to appreciating that there are a lot of moving parts the public isn’t privy to understanding. This project was a journey for me. I went in with assumptions as we all do when we are working on something we love and have a connection to. FEMA is doing what they can with the limited resources they have available. But I would argue they could be doing better in several areas: transparency, efficiency, and communication. I urge you to look through this site, and be open to understanding that you may be surprised by what you learn. That you may have a clearer and better understanding of what’s been happening in Puerto Rico, and that you feel inclined to go searching for the truth rather than being told what’s true by the media and those around you.

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