We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  It was raining and the ground was muddy. Suddenly a few pickup trucks pulled up, and several men, women and children came to greet us.

  “We have some food for you,” I told them. “Did anyone deliver food to you already?” Just MREs, they said.

  They made a human chain from the helicopter and helped us load up their pickup trucks with our meals, taking us the short journey to the middle of the town’s main street.

  We had landed in a sprawling village called Sabana Grande, close to the town of Utuado, where many people normally worked on coffee farms. But the coffee was destroyed by the hurricane and everyone was just focused on survival. There was no electricity and very little water, because the villagers relied on electrical pumps to get the water up to their homes. Three hundred families were living there, and they were pooling their resources.

  “We cook one meal a day with propane gas,” explained Norma Natal Rodriguez, a local schoolteacher. “We go to the supermarket to get rice, but there are no ATMs working and there’s no cash. The banks are closed. They distributed water one day, but if you aren’t home when they knock on your door, you don’t get water. There’s a lot of need here, but we can’t go anywhere else. Especially the old people.”

  No power meant no water. No water meant no way to keep clean or flush a toilet. And yet, these people seemed patient, good-natured and generous. We started serving our meals from the back of a pickup truck, and everyone waited happily in line for a plate or two of hot chicken and vegetables, some mashed potatoes (which kept everything warm during the journey), some cold yogurt and fresh fruit. They ate it right there and made sure to spread the word to their neighbors who weren’t at home.

  It was hard to think of all the fear and guns in San Juan, at FEMA headquarters. All those terrified government officials had warned me about the dangers of traveling to a remote place like this. But the only unsettling thing about the families of Sabana Grande was why they weren’t angry about their situation.

  “You have no water and no electricity, right?” I asked Rodriguez.

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “And no one has come here to help you.”

  “Yes. But we are well. The community is united. Nobody bothers us,” she assured me.

  But how could she say they were doing well, with no food, no water, no power and no help? Because, she explained, the people farther up in the mountains had many more problems.

  Her positivity was an inspiration to me in that moment. I was still reeling from FEMA’s news. I had no words to express how I felt. And that was rare. America was able to overcome any challenge. It was able to beat the best of Europe and the world. We’d had bad moments in American history before and we were able to overcome them, to become better along the way. But this was one of those moments when we weren’t better. The hurricane had landed twenty-one days earlier, but we still had no plan of how to feed our fellow citizens. A group of chefs had come together to feed 100,000 people a day and we could reach so many more. But now we were going to be shut down. Where were the senators and congressmen? Why weren’t they asking more questions about how these Americans were living here?

  “It means a lot that you have done this for us,” said Eduardo Luis Piñera, one of the village’s organizers.

  “I’m here so that Washington knows there are Americans here in Puerto Rico that need help,” I told him. “I know the governor is doing a lot, but the problem is that the central government has this bureaucracy that doesn’t move.”

  Eduardo didn’t seem to mind about that for the moment. “I’m sorry it doesn’t look so good now,” he told me. “But Puerto Rico is normally beautiful.” I thought one of the most beautiful things about the island was its people.

  We drove on to another part of the village, past a church whose roof had been ripped off, and beyond a dairy farm where the whole herd of cows had died in the hurricane. Telephone cables were down across the road, which was still drenched with rainwater. We flipped open the back of the pickup truck and started feeding whoever stopped by.

  As the sun set, neighbors passed on word about our hot meals and a steady flow of families came by. We could see the community coming together before our eyes, smiling, chatting and eating.

  We needed to head back before it was totally dark. Flying a helicopter was hard enough in these conditions without the added challenge of relying solely on instruments. We drove back to the overgrown baseball field and said our goodbyes. I gave them some solar lamps that you could inflate to create lanterns. Every time I handed them out, people were happier than when I gave them a plate of food. I never truly understood the power of shining a light until now. One old woman, wrapped tightly in a blanket despite the tropical humidity, insisted on hugging Erin tight. She treated us like we were her lifesavers. The night set in with no streetlamps or house lights to break the deep darkness of the island.

  As we flew back to San Juan, the big city cast a distant glow but most of the homes and towns below us were as black as the night itself. The only signs of life were the white headlights and red taillights of the cars on the road. The rest of Puerto Rico was living in the dark.

  Chapter 7

  Seeing Red

  SOME PEOPLE SPEND THEIR EARLY MORNINGS PLANNING HOW THEY ARE going to help the world. Others are just trying to get ready for another day at the office. Then there are the people who start their day watching cable TV news and tweeting in response.

  That seemed to be the way Donald Trump woke up, on the day I was heading to a distant corner of Puerto Rico: the island of Vieques. As I was figuring out how to feed the people, with or without FEMA, the president of the United States was threatening to pull out of Puerto Rico altogether. First he blamed the islanders for “a financial disaster . . . largely of their own making,” then he said their infrastructure was a disaster. Finally, he threatened to abandon the island, saying, “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!”

  It was not clear how or even why he would withdraw the U.S. military and first responders from American territory. Perhaps he still thought that Puerto Rico was a foreign country. Whatever he was thinking, it was heard loud and clear on the island: the Trump administration had barely made a dent in the recovery operations after three weeks, and now Trump himself was ready to quit.

  I set out on my travels determined to make up for the lack of leadership in my hometown of Washington, D.C.

  It’s hard enough living on an island that has been devastated by two hurricanes and is struggling to get back to normal life three weeks later. But it’s even harder if you live on an island off an island: a forgotten outpost of a limping colony. That was the fate of Vieques, east of Puerto Rico, where the full force of Maria first ripped through, before striking the big island. I had heard horror stories of lawlessness and despair there, in the initial days after the hurricane passed, but I wanted to see for myself what the situation was like. José Enrique had family in Vieques and Culebra, and we tried earlier to organize a boat trip, but the seas were too rough. It had taken some time, but we’d finally been able to rent two old single-propeller planes to take me and my team to the island, where we would set up our own World Central Kitchen food operation. “This is so important,” said Karla. “The volunteers were tearing up about this trip.”

  Vieques is a beautiful Caribbean island with crystal-blue waters and soft sandy beaches. But it’s better known for its colonial history than its tourism. The U.S. Navy seized two-thirds of the island in World War Two as a home for the British Navy in case the U.K. fell under Nazi control. For decades after the war, the navy used Vieques as a giant firing range and storage depot, even lending it out to allies for target practice. After years of protests, the navy withdrew in 2003 and the former bombing range became a wildlife refuge. There are fragments of a colonial history that stretches even farther back: the main town is called Isabel Segunda, after the Castilian qu
een who financed Columbus’s trips to the New World in 1492.

  I was still trying to fight my own political battles as we arrived at the small offices of MN Aviation at San Juan airport, where we could find our pilots and planes. The press conference was on the front page of the Metro PR newspaper, cast as chef versus FEMA. In a couple of days, House Speaker Paul Ryan was coming to visit Puerto Rico and I spoke to his office as we drove to the airport. I wanted to make sure they knew this wasn’t a partisan dispute. We were the private sector trying to help fix a public problem. In many ways, we were the conservative solution to big government bureaucracy. There was a lot in our approach that Paul Ryan could support. His staffers listened carefully and promised to keep in mind my experience and advice as they moved forward.

  We took two puddle-jumpers to Vieques so we could carry as much food as possible. Our pilot, his blue T-shirt and pants topped with a camo baseball hat, looked like he was going to play video games rather than fly between two hurricane-torn islands. We rumbled along the tarmac to a smaller runway, where we bumped and bounced our way to takeoff. Twenty seconds later, we were flying noisily over the deep blue ocean, bordered by tourist beaches that were entirely deserted. The luxury boats were all firmly docked in their harbors, and the golf courses abandoned. Inland, the rivers looked like they were full to the point of bursting. The land seemed saturated with water after two hurricanes and endless downpours since. Three weeks after Maria, the trees looked like early spring: a few small green shoots in place of the normally lush tropical leaves. After a few minutes of flying over the open sea, we turned sharply to the left to swoop down on a short airstrip along the coastline. Just two small planes were parked by the terminal, and there were few signs of activity.

  My goal was to see how we could support as many as two kitchens for two or three weeks, until federal aid could take over. I heard the islanders here were getting MREs, but that was never a sustainable or desirable way to feed people. The challenge for us was how we would pay for this expansion. But I felt the urgency of now; the need to feed hungry people who were losing hope. We could figure out the funding later.

  The airport terminal in Vieques did not reassure us about the state of the island. There was no power, meaning no lights or air-conditioning. The sole security guard was fanning herself with a tourist leaflet. Several windows were blown out and there were still sandbags outside the entrance. Gas deliveries to the island only came every three days or so, and when they arrived, there were lines that lasted three or four hours, as every islander tried to fill up his or her vehicle. Schools were only open in the morning, and the children returned home before noon, when the heat of the day became insufferable. The main employer on the island—the W Retreat & Spa—was closed for a whole year as they tried to clean up, repair walls and fences, and restore the landscape to something worth several hundred dollars a night. With four hundred employees, sustaining many more family members, the loss of the W was a body blow to the Vieques economy.

  We drove past scores of downed trees and poles, and past piles of household debris heaped along the side of the road, to the town of Esperanza on the south coast. There we were delivering a truckload of cooked food and uncooked ingredients to an empty beach restaurant, called Bili. Its chef, Eva Bolivar, was a friend of José Enrique and had just shown up at El Choli one day, knowing we wanted to help Vieques. She offered to assist us, and we prepared for regular deliveries of ingredients and cooked food, like today.

  It was hot, and the task of unloading the truck was made much worse because the aluminum trays were poorly packed and stacked. They overflowed with sticky sauce, and the smell attracted flies as we sweated and heaved the trays into the restaurant. There were supposed to be dozens of volunteers to meet us, but communications with the island were nonexistent. We were on our own.

  “We need to be smart,” I told my team. “We’re creating a mess.”

  We handed out some food to a few dozen passersby but the area seemed mostly empty of people. The few who were around were busy cleaning up the tourist businesses for some future date when the visitors might return. So we decided to load up a couple of pickup trucks and head to some homeless shelters and medical centers where we knew there were people in need.

  The scene at the George Refugio was stark. Around a hundred people were camped on simple bunk beds, sleeping on plastic mattresses. It was clean and orderly, but lifeless: the only residents there in the middle of the day were the sick and elderly, watching television or taking their medication. There was a small kitchen that gratefully took our food, but they had good news: they were also getting food from the schools. It was the first sign that our work with the education department was succeeding. Two weeks earlier, we had first pushed Julia Keleher to order the school kitchens to help local communities. She was unsure if she had the power to do so, or if her schools had the capacity to cook for large numbers. She didn’t even know if her orders were getting through to the schools because communications were so poor. But here on Vieques was the proof: a working model of how she could solve the problem of feeding those in the greatest need.

  We drove back to the island’s main hospital, where the hurricane had crushed any normal medical services. Outside, a giant Caterpillar generator coughed and belched black smoke as it struggled to provide only intermittent power to the hospital. Inside, there was no air-conditioning and the nurses fanned themselves with paper. The main building was deserted of patients, as the electricity cycled on and off in maddeningly short loops. Fans and lights turned on, then shut down. The air came alive, then it slowed to a swelter. The ceilings leaked water into the empty hallways. Outside, a wild horse wandered through the empty car park. The medical director, Dr. Betzaida Mackenzie, told me there was an old law that made it mandatory for the schools to produce food at a time like this. If that was true, I wondered why it hadn’t happened from Day One. But food was only one of their many problems: they had set up a small air-conditioned tent outside the main door for a handful of emergencies.

  We drove on, past more wild horses and the occasional stray cockerel, to the main town square in Isabel Segunda, where we set up our tables under a white canopy for some precious shade. The square attracted a sampling of post-hurricane Vieques. On one side were some watchful National Guard troops, standing outside the small government offices. Across the plaza on a concrete stage was a makeshift clothes rack with donations for needy islanders, and some tarps hanging to channel rainwater into buckets. One woman told us she hadn’t showered since Maria, almost a month ago. Homeless veterans mingled with school-age kids, some with no shoes on their feet, as we started serving our food.

  “We’re not getting the quantity of food that we need. People are eating whatever they have left in their homes,” Gypsy Cordova Garcia, the president of the city council, told me.

  “They are trying to get food in the markets with whatever cash they have left. But it’s only today that two ATMs were set up in the city hall. The bank was open but they couldn’t update the information. They only had the information prior to the hurricane. So even if you have money, you couldn’t take it out because they didn’t update things. Government jobs are all that we have right now because the private industry is zero.”

  Many people had simply left Vieques, Garcia said, and he expected many more to follow them. “People are suffering,” he said. “They are suffering from the lack of goods and services. But their spirit is good. We want to restore the island and we will get it done.”

  Sure enough, the line for the new ATMs, on the corner of the square, was as long as our line for food. It was also moving more slowly.

  Next to our food table, my friend Roberto Cacho was demonstrating one easy solution to the island’s problems: a Merlin Eco water filter, powered by solar panels. He put one tube into a bucket of rainwater, and it pumped out clean, drinkable water from another tube. The device could purify a gallon in just one minute. “They don’t have a lot of things here, but they do have a
lot of sunshine and a lot of rainwater,” said Roberto, who was the original developer of the W Retreat & Spa in Vieques.

  One of my best local chef partners joined us serving the food: Carlos Perez from El Blok. We left half the trays of food with him and told him to distribute them. I could trust him to get the food to the people in need.

  Before we returned to the main island, I stopped by the local Boys and Girls Club to feed the children there. The kids lined up neatly and patiently to get a hot plate of chicken and rice.

  “Who is hungry?” I asked. Everyone put up their hands.

  It was such a simple thing. There was so little that needed to be done to improve people’s lives. Looking at these hungry children, I couldn’t understand why it was so hard to empower my team of chefs to make the people happy again.

  My love of feeding the children meant we were late returning to the airport. We arrived to find that our plane had already left without us. We had to sit on the tarmac, waiting for another one to come back to get us. The place was almost deserted, save for a shack of a bar, tucked behind a couple of big noisy generators, where I bought a few cans of beer. We cracked them open and sat watching another puddle-jumper take a handful of passengers down the taxi lane to the end of the runway. Suddenly, as it passed by, the cargo door flipped open. We could see the bags inside, along with several packets of bottled water. I had to do something: the cargo could drop on someone, or unbalance the plane in the air. I started chasing down the plane, running down the tarmac as fast as I could in the tropical heat, waving my arms and shouting over the noise of the turboprop. Somehow, thankfully, the pilot saw me and he stopped to shut the door.

  If I wasn’t going to help them, who would?

  IT WAS THE END OF MY THIRD WEEK ON THE ISLAND AND I WAS GETTING increasingly impatient with the big charities and the NGOs that had so much money but were doing so little. The Salvation Army liked to show photos of themselves handing out food, but they never said where the food came from. The Red Cross didn’t care if the food was hot or cold. And then there was World Central Kitchen, with only three full-time employees across the world, now preparing more than 100,000 meals a day. We had crossed the half-million mark for total meals prepared, thanks to a small FEMA contract, a lot of small donations, and some credit lines and credit cards that were maxed out long ago.