We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  We walked outside, to the car park, where the volunteers were loading up aluminum trays of creamy soft macaroni and ham with sweet corn and peas, along with sausage and chicken. I rolled out my map on the driveway and marked the church as our newest kitchen. It was officially on the map. I pointed to a Salvation Army kitchen not so far away and asked the church team if they ever saw them or their food as the team delivered hundreds of meals in a twenty-mile radius from Peña Pobre. They said no.

  THAT SAME DAY GOVERNOR ROSSELLÓ TRAVELED TO THE WHITE HOUSE to meet President Trump and his cabinet in the latest round of his quiet efforts to get more support from the mainland. In public, Rosselló was tactful and respectful, prodding Trump to do more while taking care to sound like he was praising him. When reporters asked the two leaders questions in the Oval Office, the difference between them was as wide as the island. Rosselló praised Trump excessively for the smallest things, while Trump praised himself excessively for things he imagined to be true. Neither man seemed connected to anything we were seeing in Puerto Rico itself.

  “It’s been a very, very difficult situation for many people, I will say that, and especially the island nature,” said Trump, stating the obvious. “If you look at getting food there, we did. The distribution was very difficult because the roads were blocked and even the people of Puerto Rico couldn’t get to their food, in many cases because of the distribution centers, and the roads were in really horrific shape, because of the storm, and sometimes because of before the storm. But with that being said, step by step it’s taken care of.”

  So Trump knew people “couldn’t get to their food” but thought it was because of the roads. And he now thought it was “taken care of.” Either he was wildly ignorant of the food situation on the island or he was trying to fool the press and people watching at home.

  A second question got to the heart of whether his information was accurate. Conservative media were jumping all over rumors that the cause of the food crisis was local government corruption: officials hoarding food for themselves. It was a nice way to give up, to pretend like there was nothing the government could do to solve this hunger crisis in America. Fox News reported that the FBI was investigating complaints that local officials were prioritizing supplies for their supporters.2 The FBI said they didn’t know if the accusations were accurate, but that didn’t stop the story from going viral. I have no doubt there was plenty of corruption and favoritism, but they weren’t the reason why people were going hungry in Puerto Rico.

  In any case, Trump had made his mind up. “Well, I’m working very closely with the government on that because there has been corruption on the island and we can’t have that. You know, we’re sending a lot of supplies, we’re sending tremendous amounts of food and water and everything.” Washington was sending tremendous amounts of MREs, but both the food and water were totally inadequate. Rosselló said they were investigating “whether there has been mismanagement of food” and promised “there is going to be some hell to pay” if it turned out to be true.

  As for his own federal efforts, Trump seemed to think they were delivering food and water by helicopters in great quantities. “You have areas in Puerto Rico where we literally had, and still have to—but it’s getting less and less—deliver food and supplies by helicopter because the roads have been wiped out and the bridges have been wiped out,” he explained. Perhaps he watched his own White House video too quickly to understand what the helicopters were doing and how many of the shots were repeated. Because I, for one, had had no luck getting military helicopters to deliver food. And I heard from many people in the military that the helicopters didn’t have enough missions to keep them busy.

  One reporter asked Trump how he rated the White House response on a scale of one to ten. “I’d say it was a ten,” he said modestly, pointing to comments from James Lee Witt, who ran FEMA under President Clinton. Witt said he’d give them an A+ for their work on hurricane recovery. “I think we did a fantastic job and we are being given credit,” Trump said. “It was very nice that the gentleman who worked for Bill Clinton when he was president gave us an A+, and that included Puerto Rico. Gave us an A+ and I thought that was really very nice. And I think—I really believe—he’s correct. We have done a really great job.” Witt later issued a statement making it clear that he was only talking about the response to the earlier hurricanes in Texas and Florida, not the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

  Rosselló was asked the same question, and he dodged it by promising that power would be restored to half the island by next month. Trump wasn’t satisfied and pushed the governor to praise him. “Did the United States—did our government—when we came in, did we do a great job?” he asked. “Military, first responders, FEMA—did we do a great job?”

  “You responded immediately, sir,” Rosselló said, dodging the question once again. “But if you consider that . . . we’ve gotten about 15,000 DoD personnel in Puerto Rico, about 2,000 FEMA personnel, HHS and others—the response is there. Do we need to do a lot more? Of course we do. And I think everybody over here recognizes there’s a lot of work to be done in Puerto Rico.”

  Rosselló was too subtle. Trump ended by going back to the comments of the former Clinton official for his A+ rating. “While I don’t know him, I would like to thank him for what he said.”

  I wouldn’t give Trump or Rosselló a ten or an A+ for their work. And I certainly wouldn’t give myself anything more than a five for my own, because there was so much more we needed to do. We failed to reach so many people who needed so much help. The only people who deserved a ten were the volunteers and first responders who were so selfless in their work. But as leaders, we did not deserve anything close to a top grade.

  I LIKED TO LEAVE SAN JUAN AS MUCH AS I COULD. NOT JUST TO ESCAPE the intensity of the giant feeding factory there, but to pick up intelligence on what was happening around the island, and how our satellite operations were doing. I needed to see for myself where the real needs were, and how we were meeting them. Over time, people were surely adjusting to life after the hurricane. There would come a time, probably soon, when we would need to change what we were doing because life on the island was changing too. This was one of the most important reasons we were so different from what I saw of FEMA and the other nonprofits. Our intelligence operations helped shape what we were doing and where we were doing it. Their intelligence seemed at best out of date and at worst nonexistent.

  I liked to visit our culinary school kitchens to check on the quality of their cooking. With eight of these running, they were producing large numbers of hot meals and needed regular visits to make sure they were getting the right amount of chicken on each plate. It was too easy for them to skimp on the expensive ingredients to save themselves money while denying the people of Puerto Rico the good meals they deserved.

  But my best trips were with what I called our Navy SEAL operations: our food trucks. They weren’t perfect. They were old trucks and prone to breaking down, so the distances we asked them to drive every day were a heavy strain. They drove into areas where the Homeland Security police only traveled with guns and flak jackets. But our food truck partners were determined to serve the people in need, and they never experienced any trouble as they handed out up to 1,500 meals a day. By now, a full calendar month after Maria, they knew their routes and their communities very well. They were friends with their customers; they knew their family stories and their daily schedules. They had learned what times of day were best, and where the elderly were housebound and couldn’t come to the truck, and which kids could help them serve the food.

  We had ten trucks in operation but two of them were the heart and soul of our operation, run by two sisters, Xoimar and Yareli Manning. They were two of our original partners from day one of our operation at José Enrique’s restaurant in Santurce. José Enrique’s text to join us was one of the first they received after several days of getting no cell phone signal following the hurricane. It came just in time. “I
was going to the States and moving out of Puerto Rico,” Xoimar said, “because I couldn’t handle it. I wanted to be able to run my business. My generator wasn’t big enough to run my kitchen. I had no power, no water, no signal, no school for my daughter. My friend in Florida told me to come to her house. I’m frickin’ dead and this is the end of the world. I thought I was leaving as soon as I could.”

  The sisters started their food truck businesses a decade ago, after watching a TV show about a food truck in North Carolina called Chirba Chirba dumplings. Xoimar’s husband turned to her and said, “This is what we’re going to do.” The food truck scene was just starting up, and they bought a truck the next day. The business, Yummy Dumplings, was a huge success, running six days a week with double shifts on Thursdays and Fridays, until the day that Maria struck. Xoimar ran Yummy Dumplings and Yareli ran The Meatball Company, normally out of a food truck park they started in San Juan. Yareli had visited all my restaurants in Washington, D.C., and never thought we’d end up working together.

  They were fearless and tireless, driving for hours each day in old trucks with no cell phone service, into places where our Homeland Security friends expected to see lawlessness. Instead they found families who were struggling to survive and delighted to see them. “This gave me hope that things would be getting better. We were working and we were busy. It was better than sitting at home. It felt so good and so right. I’m willing to do it forever,” said Xoimar. I loved their spirit and no-nonsense attitude, and I especially loved their family. Xoimar’s ten-year-old daughter, Lola, reminded me of my own girls, not so long ago, and she showed up to work every day without complaint. I would tell her to take a break from the sandwich line, but she would never listen. I was so impressed with her, I promised I would pay for her college education.

  The rundown streets of Loíza, on the northeast coast, were the regular food run for the Yummy Dumplings truck. “This is my dad’s neighborhood,” Xoimar told me, as we walked the streets making deliveries behind the truck. “This is where he spent his time when he was young. So for me, serving the people he grew up with is important.” The local kids ran out to greet her and the older folks embraced her at every stop. They had only seen their local mayor once since the storm, handing out some diapers and water. Yummy Dumplings was the biggest provider of storm relief in the area. The food truck team parked near a baseball field, and whistled to announce their arrival. Dozens of kids, some on bikes, came from all points for a plate of mac and cheese, rice with beef stew, an apple and a bottle of water. “I come twice a week and I try to give to them a different meal each time,” Xoimar said. “These people are having a hard time.”

  We drove on another few blocks to where some people were still stranded by floods. One of them was ninety-one-year-old Teodoro Figueroa Rodriguez, known as Lolo, whose entire front yard was under water. I put on some rubber boots and waded through the murky water to take plenty of food to his marooned home. Lolo was a National Guard veteran who needed the help. His daughter worked long hours as a nurse in San Juan, so he was alone for most of his day.

  “Thank you for looking after me and not forgetting me,” he told me. “I’m glad the young people like you care for people like me.”

  The next day I wanted to find an even harder-hit part of the island to see how it was faring. For that, my Homeland Security friends strongly suggested they drive me around, just in case we found some of the long-rumored but never-seen dangers they were so heavily armed for. I was happy to say yes, because we needed another car, so I climbed into a Jeep with deportation officer Alex Sabel and special agent Krystle Intoe. With plenty of sandwiches and bottles of water in the back of the Jeep, we headed for Aguadilla, two hours to the far west of San Juan, where conditions were supposed to be very poor. But halfway there, we decided to stop at another poor town, Morovis, at the center of the island, just to try our luck as we searched for pockets of hungry people. In the middle of the town we spotted an SUV parked by the side of the road with a couple of local officials handing out MREs. Nobody was interested in taking them. We offered them our sandwiches to distribute instead, and they happily took them.

  A little farther down the road, there was a long line of people outside a simple tin shack with smoke billowing out from under its corrugated roof. My gut told me this was exactly what I was looking for: a sign of food life returning to the island. The smoke was coming from a charcoal pit where ten giant spits were slowly turning, driven by a long bike chain, as they roasted dozens and dozens of chickens. The smell of the chicken and adobo spices, dripping onto the charcoal, was enough to make your mouth water from a block away. A whole chicken with a plate of beans and rice cost less than $9.25 and could easily feed four people. That was several dollars less than each of the single-person MREs they couldn’t give away nearby. This was food that the people of Puerto Rico wanted to eat, at a price they could afford: just a couple of dollars for a delicious and filling meal. In fact, it was so good, it was food anyone would eat in Washington or New York at prices two or three times higher.

  The restaurant, called Maelo’s Chicken Fever, had only just reopened and it seemed to be doing very well. I asked the customers lining up if they knew where people were struggling nearby and several pointed me to the village of San Lorenzo. The bridge there had been washed away by the floods that followed Maria, and they were effectively cut off from the rest of Morovis. The old river crossing was a ford and if the water flow wasn’t too strong, it was possible to drive across.

  “This is good news. Things are coming back to the old Puerto Rico way of life,” I told my HSI friends as we ate a couple of plates of delicious chicken. “But there are communities that are isolated and we need to have the urgency of now to keep bringing food and water. The food issue is still with us.”

  Our mission was to find these people and to help them. Aguadilla was just another one of our satellite kitchens, where I would be checking the quality of the cooking. This trip to San Lorenzo seemed much more important. We drove another ten minutes to the river, where the huge concrete bridge was collapsed. Part of it was beneath us on one side of the river. Part of it was washed away on the other riverbank. A middle section was nowhere to be seen.

  Down below, the ford was clearly visible but it ran alongside a steep drop in the riverbed, and the currents seemed too strong and turbulent for our Jeep. A couple of people were crossing by foot along the edge of the ford, but as they neared the middle of the river, they all stumbled to knee depth as the ground grew uneven. It looked like a tricky walk at that point, with the drop of the river so close, the water flow so strong and the riverbed so thick with slippery moss. One false move and you’d go tumbling headfirst into the water. Overhead there was a wire strung from one bank of the river to the other, but it didn’t look like it would offer much support. It was a long way from where the people were walking, over a part of the river where the flow looked even faster.

  We waved to some of the people crossing the river by foot and they told us around a thousand villagers lived in San Lorenzo. We met them in the middle of the river, gave them the few boxes of sandwiches we had left, and they walked them back to the other side. I decided to return with cooked food for all the village. For now, we could either drive over to our kitchen in Manatí, where they weren’t expecting us, or we could head back to the roast chicken shack and support the local food economy. It wasn’t a tough choice.

  Alex, my Homeland Security escort, helped me carry the sandwiches halfway across the river to the people walking to San Lorenzo. “I’m forty-six years old and this is the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said.

  Alex was a deportation officer but an unusual one. Born in Argentina and raised in Colombia, he now lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where he worked in peer support for people going through trauma. “We have these law enforcement skills to help the average person. You just have to open the window a little bit more,” he explained. “A lot of us are immigrants too, you know.” />
  “I never thought I would be helping people by working with ICE,” I joked. In fact, I had staff of mine back on the mainland asking me why I, an advocate for immigrants and immigration reform, was working so closely with the people behind all of Trump’s deportations. But photos on Twitter only tell half the story. I could only say that even though ICE was breaking up families, there are some good people there who are doing good work.

  As we drove back to Maelo’s, I regretted not fully crossing the river. I wanted to see San Lorenzo for myself and talk to the people about how they were doing. Then by chance I saw my opportunity: ahead of us on the road, by some backhoes clearing trees felled by the hurricane, was a convoy of three military Humvees.

  I jumped out of our Jeep to talk to the group inside them, a small and unlikely combination of military police and air force engineers. They were stationed at the same base and decided one day, out of boredom, to see what they could do together. The engineers were specialists in water systems and the MPs knew there were water treatment plants that needed fixing. Now they were just about to repair the local water treatment plant, to bring it back online. I asked if they could help us cross the river in their Humvees, and they agreed, once they completed their repairs in a few hours.

  “If we only let people in the field do what they need to do, like you and I and these men and women are doing, things will be operational so much easier and so much quicker,” I told them. “If we had to coordinate with headquarters, it would take three days.” Or it would never happen at all, I thought.

  We took their satellite phone number and returned to Maelo’s to get our chicken. A lot of chicken: five hundred portions, in fact. The restaurant was delighted to get an order of 120 chickens. Two people started unboxing more chickens at the side of the shack, while a third was sliding chickens onto long metal spits, eight chickens on each six-foot pole.

  “This is what everyone should be doing,” said Alex, the deportation officer. “Anyone in a position of influence should just be doing things like this and making things happen.”