Last week marked one month since the beginning of the catastrophe caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. A catastrophe through which we are still living.
As of this writing, only 20 percent of Puerto Rico has power. Our university campus, the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, is one of the lucky places that has electricity. We also have water. Let me paint a picture of the extremely privileged position in which this puts us.
There is word of a community of 23 families in Utuado who were trapped when the bridge over the river washed out. They were able to get food only by drawing it in grocery carts on a line suspended across the water.
Our friend and contractor, who had come to help us prepare a quote for damages, choked up as he told us of families in San Lorenzo — four, five, six people — living in their bathrooms, the only part that remained of their homes. They asked him for food and water. He asked them: What are you waiting here for? They replied, “Cualquier cosa.” Anything.
For about two weeks we’ve been watching dual-propeller military helicopters airlift white plastic bundles of what we thought were food and water. Yesterday we found out that they contain materials that are being air-dropped to support the dam at Lake Guajataca, which has been severely compromised by the storm, threatening thousands of residents.
They say that natural disasters don’t discriminate, but of course they do. University professors are some of the few salaried employees in Puerto Rico. If you work in a coffee shop and it is closed, you don’t get paid.
Still, over a month later, there is only one TV station broadcasting in all of Puerto Rico. There are now three AM radio stations that we can hear in Mayagüez. You can tell where the cellphone data signals are by the people pulled over on the sides of the roads, checking their phones. Yet we have high-speed internet on campus.
They say that natural disasters don’t discriminate, but of course they do. University professors are some of the few salaried employees in Puerto Rico. We never stopped getting paid, even when there were no banks or ATMs working. But many small businesses in our area haven’t reopened yet. If you work in a coffee shop and it is closed, you don’t get paid.
And there are many other ways that social-class difference marks experiences after the hurricane. There were no other professors in the human-resources office to fill out the online form for FEMA assistance. It was packed with university support personnel: janitors, secretaries, maintenance workers. The janitor of our building told us how he lost everything, how the water had entered his house and moved his furniture from room to room, like it was swirling in a blender.
My husband and I stood out as professors in that waiting room. Most academics have the resources to own or rent a concrete house. To live in a nonflood zone. To have private insurance. To leverage their many resources to keep going. In other words, even though water and a mudslide have damaged our road, because of the university and our privileged place in it we are relatively fine, while most others are not.
What is our responsibility, then?
Before Maria, Puerto Rico faced the worst financial crisis in its history. This gravely affected the public university, which faced unprecedented cuts that could destroy it. During the spring 2017 semester (last semester, though it seems like ages ago), our students shut down the university in an almost two-month strike to protest these cuts. Over that time, something became painfully clear: Few people understood the value of the public-university system and its essential role in Puerto Rican society. And this was our fault, as an institution. We did not do our job of showing people the direct, tangible benefits of having public institutions of higher education.
And now? Now we are starting classes on October 30. As if nothing is wrong. As if there are not families living in their bathrooms. As if there aren’t still entire communities stranded, waiting for a shopping cart full of food, which doesn’t even meet their basic needs. As if the very people who have cleaned up the downed trees, the flooded buildings, are not also going home to downed trees and flooded buildings.
I am torn. I feel the need to return to some kind of normalcy, and I’m sure our students feel it, too. But even though the campus has water and power, the surrounding neighborhoods, where most students live, do not (we do not have campus residence halls). It is pitch dark in these neighborhoods at 6:30 p.m., with no street lights, houses, or businesses lit up. Do we bring thousands of students back here to live in the dark? Without reliable phone service to communicate with their families?
Mayagüez is recovering well because we didn’t get hit as badly as most other places. So maybe the students will be better off here than at home. But culturally, being a university student in Puerto Rico is different than being a university student in the states. Everyone goes home to their families on the weekends. Every weekend. Many students use Pell Grant money to support their families as well as themselves. University students are not seen as new adults, free and unburdened, but as integrated family members whose experience as students still must contribute to the progress of the family. How do students in communities more devastatingly affected by Maria leave their families and come to Mayagüez?
But what if we didn’t start classes again right away? What if the university became a force for helping the nonuniversity community? What if we helped everyone fill out the FEMA forms? These, by the way, can only be filled out online or by phone — in a country where 80 percent of people are without power. What if the university’s experts could be put to work full time on Puerto Rico’s infrastructure problems, on potable water, on agricultural projects?
What if we could use the system of community involvement already established by the university’s Agricultural Extension Service to help with all aspects of life, which have now been turned upside down for the vast majority of Puerto Ricans?
What should the university be in a time of catastrophe? This: The center of service — a relevant and essential key to the survival, recovery, and betterment of the land and the people it serves.
Catherine M. Mazak is a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.
Correction (11/2/2017, 2:54 p.m.): An earlier version of this essay provided inaccurate details about support efforts at the Lake Guajataca dam. These have been corrected.
