 My name is Pablo Eduardo Paredes Burgos, I'm a Puerto Rican student undergrad and I'm very involved with the group Bordiquaz and Berkeley on campus which is mostly graduate students but I'm involved as the oldest undergrad and we've been trying to be as active as we can ever since we got the news that a lot of our family members were without light, without water due to Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria and the political context of still being kind of a colonial entity of the United States has made it really difficult for the recovery to happen. So we've all been looking for ways to support. The initial push which we interviewed in November around was you know just immediate relief right. Folks needed food, they needed solar lights because there was no power and there wasn't going to be power for a while. They needed tarps because the roofs had been tore up and were leaky. Batteries, mattresses, all kinds of really essential and basics. FEMA back then and now the big joke on the island is that the F in FEMA stands for Fantasma which is a phantom. So no one knows where FEMA actually is and what they're actually doing on the island because everywhere you go they haven't seen FEMA. It's crazy and that's just one anecdote that paints the picture of an abandoned Puerto Rico. When I went to Umacau which is one of the first towns on the path of the hurricane and nobody had light up in the the Campo of the Mariana la Loma la Mariana you know I asked people that well what's the plan? When does FEMA say? When does the government said there is no plan? We have no idea. It may never happen and we are still not doing enough about it. I just went back on the last week of March during spring break. I'm now working with the Alternative Breaks office here on campus and what we want to do is we want to replicate the model that Alternative Breaks practiced for about a decade in New Orleans, Louisiana. After Katrina devastated the region and after the government response was you know very similar or the lack of response is very similar we learned a lot of lessons and Cal even all the way over here on California was able to become part of that process. What I want to say to UC Berkeley students is to get a little bit more conscious on this and become an advocate. We need you because the diaspora is smaller on the West Coast because there's only about 14,000 Puerto Ricans in the Bay Area. Folks don't know we exist that no matter what has happened the people and the land are resilient and we're gonna get back on our feet with or without federal help. It's criminal that the federal government hasn't been responsible to its citizens in Puerto Rico and it's non-citizens because everybody in Puerto Rico deserves support right now but the people are not gonna take it laying down the people are standing up the refrain across the islands Puerto Rico Celevanta Puerto Rico stands up.