Waiting For Supplies For His Home, One Puerto Rican Rebuilds Another Man’s House Instead
Hurricane Maria destroyed Ramón Luis Morales’s roof, but he hasn’t been able to finish rebuilding because he’s still waiting on supplies. In the meantime, he’s helping another man in need fix his house. Photo by Ryan Caron King for Connecticut Public Radio
You only have to ask Ramón Luis Morales once to know that the trauma of Hurricane Maria is still fresh.
“In Maria, it destroyed the whole roof, destroyed my cars, destroyed my life. It was not easy,” he said.
Morales said he was denied FEMA assistance. So he’s stuck waiting for help from volunteers. Until he gets it, he sleeps with his wife and son in just one room. Often, his blue tarp still leaks; some days there is power, but on this day there wasn’t, on a day when all of Puerto Rico was watching the remnants of a tropical storm about to pass through.
“We just worry, at any minute, we’re going to lose whatever we have left. It’s not much, but at least it’s ours,” Morales said. “And when you have a house – that’s one thing I learned in life from my parents – you have everything…When you lose that, that’s the moment you know that everything is [lost].”
So you’d think that, with a storm on its way, Morales would have been at his house with his family. But he wasn’t.
“This is somebody I am helping to fix his roof and his walls,” Morales said, referring to Manuel Antonio Perez Rosa, whose house only recently got a roof. “Because he was worse than me.”
We met over the course of a couple days at the home of Manuel Antonio Perez Rosa. He lives in Manati, 40 or so minutes west of San Juan. His house is a small, wood-frame structure with a metal roof – half of which Maria and its fallen trees destroyed. Since the storm wrecked his bed, Perez Rosa sleeps on a small loveseat by the door, with the back of the house open to the elements.