Stories
Seven weeks ago, Hurricane Maria roared through the center of Puerto Rico. Winds battered the palm leaves and rain poured over the houses in the town of Barrancas.
Angel Rodriguez stood on the porch of his apartment overlooking the bay of San Juan. In the distance, a military helicopter was lifting off from an airstrip near the city’s convention center where the hurricane relief effort was being staged.
It was mid-October, more than four weeks after Maria, and San Juan was still recovering. But Rodriguez said that compared to the east side of the island where he grew up — where the hurricane first made landfall — the city looks like “Disneyland.”
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For immigrants in the country illegally, the fear of running into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents has made some public places appear threatening. In the current environment, that can include a visit to the emergency room.
We drove to Caguas, a city south of San Juan, four weeks after Hurricane Maria hit. Our guide was Luis Cotto — a former Hartford city councilman now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We traveled to Puerto Rico to tell stories; he traveled to deliver thousands of dollars in inflatable solar lights and water filters to people who need them, including members of his family.
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Blanca Ortiz-Torres was sitting in a Puerto Rican oasis. She was at a working bakery in the tiny mountain town of Maricao that had both a generator and a cistern and, as a result, could serve cold drinks, hot coffee, fresh pastries, and pizza.
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There’s a doctor in New London who’s ending her decades-long medical practice on Friday. She’s nearly 85, but her retirement is not voluntary. She says she’s being forced to shut down by a system that no longer values the type of patient-centered medicine that she practices. But the New Hampshire Board of Medicine has a different take. They’re challenging her medical decision making and other aspects of her work.
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Students, families and many school staff in Holyoke, Massachusetts, are still desperate for news from relatives in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria hit last week.
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Over a year ago, residents near Merrimack, New Hampshire learned their drinking water had been contaminated by emissions from a plastics plant owned by the multinational company, Saint-Gobain.
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More than 30 governors from across the U.S. are gathering in Providence for the summer meeting of the National Governors Association. An epidemic of opioid abuse in the states is one of the top problems facing the elected officials.
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OPINION To prepare for an outdoor church service last month, volunteers at Shiloh Baptist Church knocked on every door within a 10-block radius of the Hartford, Connecticut church. They weren’t proselytizing, per se. Instead, they were trying to draw their Clay Arsenal neighborhood’s attention to the health fair after that June service. The fair would…
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