 When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, I was devastated as a lot of us were for a couple of days I was speechless and I couldn't stop crying. I would cry myself every day since I woke up until I went to bed I couldn't reach any of my family members and We are we a couple of the bodiquets here. We had men back in April So I sent out an email to everyone that we had met in this initial meeting in April And I was like look we should should just get together and just talk this through like let's not be alone So many posts still knocked down so many people without water without light Happy to be with Bodiquets in Berkeley trying to do what we can to both create people to people connections and provide direct aid but also to kind of try to push this institution really As the most prestigious public university in the united states to do something None of us had heard from our families at that point and we're all kind of desperate But at the same time we just couldn't stay put. It's really scary that today Today people are still suffering from that hurricane 60 or a few more days From 60 have passed and people are still suffering And so folks have been unemployed folks have been jobless folks have had Job insecurity house insecurity And when you take a situation that fragile everything in Puerto Rico is very fragile before the hurricane because of the political situation between the mainland and the island that is treated as second-class status So that when a hurricane and a devastating the most devastating hurricane in a hundred years shows up It hits that reality Fortunately, my family is okay, but it's not the same for other people in my town More than a thousand houses were destroyed in a city our town that has 30,000 people So the reality is a lot of Puerto Ricans are very clear that they're not going to get support Maybe up to a year from now Around the electricity issue around the water issue all over the southeast people have pbc pipes Plugged into streams streams that are downstream from open pit Waste dumps from toxic stuff and that's why we're having A fears about a pandemic. We do have an upcoming event on December 17th in La Beña cultural center in the afternoon. There's going to be this huge Puerto Rican Christmas party, but right on the outside of La Beña We'll be collecting basic need donations the trees that weren't on solid foundation are completely knocked over with no hope of Regrowing and that's the truth of a lot of people if you had some certain Resources and structures that supported you family members places to go You're in a place where you can regrow and rebuild and if you didn't then you're really marginalized and it really Is looking pretty dire unless something massive changes in the structures and the politics right now of the island