Brooklyn College Students Help to Rebuild Puerto Rico
Aug. 1, 2018
Senior Jonathan Cabral working on a rooftop in Puerto Rico.
For two weeks in June, senior Jonathan Cabral rode in a minivan down a San Juan, Puerto Rico highway five mornings a week. From the view on the expressway, "you’d barely know anything happened," he says, explaining how parts of the island look nearly a year after being ravaged by Hurricane Maria, the category 4 storm that left an estimated $100 billion in damages in its wake last September. "I was expecting to see disaster but a lot of central San Juan has been cleaned up."
But then, his van would make a right after its exit into the barrio known as La Playita, Santurce. "It’s another world when you enter Playita," says the Television and Radio major. "Some houses are completely destroyed. Most of them don’t have roofs. It’s just a mess. And it’s still like that in many of the low-income communities. They get the biggest impact and are often the last ones to get recovery."
Playita made headlines last year when residents hung signs on that same expressway’s overpass that read "SOS, Playita needs food and water." According to news reports, which featured images of sewage-tainted flood water standing in the street, residents of the low-income enclave did not receive aid for more than a week after the storm.
Conditions like these are exactly what attracted Cabral and his 39-student cohort to work on the island—where hundreds of residents remain without power—through CUNY Service Corps, a five-year old program that places CUNY students in paid work experiences in local community-based organizations and government agencies with the goal of improving the civic, economic, and environmental sustainability of New York City.
This year, however, Service Corps administrators decided to heed the call of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s NY Stands with Puerto Rico initiative and sent 195 CUNY students—15 of them from Brooklyn College—to the island in trips staggered throughout the summer, where they spent two weeks mostly building and repairing roofs.
"Going to Puerto Rico has been life changing for many students, opening their eyes to their place in a global community, and understanding that they can make the world a better place with their own two hands," says Curtis Dann-Messier, the university director of continuing education and workforce programs.
What’s more, he says, students got acquainted with families, learned Bomba—an Afro-Puerto Rican dance—and shared stories with Puerto Rican students. "The program is also one of deep cultural exchange," he says.
Watch CUNY Service Corps students in Puerto Rico.
Cabral says he has always kept up with social and political issues on the U.S. territory because he lives in the South Bronx, where Puerto Rican culture is pervasive. "You can’t avoid hearing a lot of the discussions around statehood and their economy and infrastructure," he says. Plus, as a Dominican, "Puerto Rico is kinda like a sister island to me," he adds.
He had also been to the island in 2010 with the Sierra Club to help organize their annual leatherback turtle festival, where he got to know the community and grew an affinity for the culture. So he was naturally interested when he saw posters around campus and received emails about the opportunity to help rebuild.
After a two-day training from CUNY that included discussions about global citizenship and some history on Puerto Rico, Cabral headed down to the commonwealth, where he and his CUNY colleagues stayed in dormitories at Universidad del Sagrado Corazon (Sacred Heart University). He roomed with a student from Queens College.
They spent their days under the supervision of a professional construction crew learning to work drills and hammers in the service of ripping up and repairing badly damaged corrugated metal roofs, which reflected gobs of heat from the Caribbean sun. "There was no shade and nowhere to hide," says Cabral, though he was aware that any inconveniences he faced paled in comparison to what the natives were going through. He says they showed nothing but gratitude and kinship.
He says he’ll never forget the sprightly and funny older Dominican woman who had immigrated to the island and told stories of her life adventures or the local veteran who cooked rice and peas, turkey, and fried pork for the group—"the best I ate while I was there," says Cabral.
As a Spanish-speaking student, Cabral often served as an interpreter and enjoyed many opportunities to simply sit and chat with residents. "Where my family is from in the Dominican Republic, you sit outside and whoever walks by stops and hangs out for a couple of hours just talking," he says. "You get the same thing in Puerto Rico. I love that way of life. And it felt good getting to know the people we were helping. It started to feel personal."
Cabral says he got such a deep satisfaction from the work he did on the trip that it was hard to come home. He is spending the rest of his summer working at a café in East Harlem and researching and conducting interviews for a radio piece on Dominican nationalism that he's hoping to pitch to Latino media.
He says he plans to return to the island many times and could even see himself living there one day. "One of cool things I took away from the trip is a passion to continue fighting for awareness for the situation in Puerto Rico," he says.
