What One Reporter Saw in a University’s Devastation

There’s something familiar about humid San Juan, rebuilding amid the mess Hurricane Maria left behind. It looks like home.

In 2005, Slidell, La., my hometown about 34 miles from New Orleans, was struck by Hurricane Katrina. Water from Lake Pontchartrain flooded my home, and a tree from the backyard fell in the living room. The giant palm tree that shaded the front of the house was fine. My family was too.

In Louisiana floods and hurricanes are a way of life. People put their waterfront homes on stilts. They elevate their homes with bricks. They buy cheap furniture.

When rebuilding your house you live in a FEMA trailer or temporarily move into a relative’s or family friend’s place. You buy groceries at the first Winn-Dixie open. You attend Mass in a grade-school cafeteria.

You get creative, rebuild, and accept that natural disasters may strike. But you don’t move. You learn a bit more with every flood and pray every hurricane season that you’re spared. And sometimes you are.

While reporting this story on how the University of Puerto Rico is recovering after Hurricane Maria, I heard a similar sentiment from Puerto Ricans. Conditions are rough, and the only solution is to adapt.

For many Puerto Ricans there is nowhere else to go, as leaving for the mainland is expensive and there are no neighboring states to turn to. So residents accept that hurricanes will happen. UPR students heard their families talk about Hurricane Georges like Louisiana State University students know storm stories from Hurricane Camille.

The University of Puerto Rico’s Rio Piedras campus is littered with palm trees, just like the rest of the island. On a sunny day the trees are the signal of island life, providing shade and swinging with the ocean breeze.

The trees can also sustain hurricane-force winds because their spongy tissue allows them to sway and bend. And unlike that tree in my backyard, palm trees don’t snap and land in your living room.

There’s an inherent flexibility that comes along with living in place that’s vulnerable to natural disasters. You just don’t notice it until you need it.

UPR’s Rio Piedras campus has all the hallmarks of a traditional flagship. It serves the most students in the university system. The campus mascot, a red rooster, is spotted all over campus. And students carrying backpacks and books are spotted all around the surrounding Rio Piedras neighborhood.

And students’ and professors’ go-with-the-flow island attitude has facilitated different ways to persevere through post-hurricane challenges.

For example, Yolanda Izquierdo, a literature professor at the Rio Piedras campus, decided she would teach a course on cities in literature, and put her lecture packet online for students to download instead of having students buy the packet at a local printer. Then Hurricane Maria hit.

When the semester started after the storm, she gave students a thumb drive where, luckily, she had uploaded the lecture packet. Students copied it and distributed it among themselves with WhatsApp, a messaging app, when they found decent cell service.

This semester almost all of Ms. Izquierdo’s students have WhatsApp groups for her courses, where students communicate about assignments and distribute materials and readings for class. One group even added Ms. Izquierdo to the group, where she sometimes chimes in with answers to questions.

Marlon Moralez Nigaglioni, a second-year pharmacy student at the Medical Sciences campus, said that when students have to wear professional dress for presentations some of his classmates flat-iron their hair in campus bathrooms because their homes don’t have power. It’s one of many changes students have had to adapt to after the storm.

Mr. Moralez Nigaglioni also had to study by candlelight before power came back to his apartment. At first he refused to study with candles, but then he realized that he had no other option, and that he needed more candles. To see a full page of notes in a pitch-black apartment you need at least two or three candles.

At UPR’s Humacao campus, what passes for a campus library is a white plastic tarp with a small sign reading “Biblioteca.” There’s a yellow library cart with some textbooks, like biology, calculus, social sciences, American history, and a Spanish dictionary. The textbooks are used as reference materials by students as they sit under the tarps’ shade and chat, eat lunch, or try to study.

Hurricane Maria destroyed divisions of study and social spaces on the campus, now littered with plastic tarps. The library is no exception. But when there’s still class to attend and tests to take, what else can you do?

Ileana Carrión Maldonado, a social-work professor at the Humacao campus, doesn’t have power at her house. After class she drives to her sister-in-law’s house where there is power to wash clothes. She goes while the sun is still out and always brings food, Ms. Carrión Maldonado said. She doesn’t want to use resources without giving something in return.

Adapting for other students means taking advantage of campus resources, like donated plate lunches. For some students the beans and rice and stewed chicken is the only hot meal they get a day.

Other students wash and dry clothes in the campus breezeways and charge their electronics there.

In the post-Maria wreckage, there’s less of a difference between what students do at home and on campus. But there’s nowhere else to go, and on this island crisis pushes you to creativity.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a breaking-news reporter. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.