We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  A week later, in mid-November, the sandwich operation abruptly stopped. There was no transition and no announcement.

  OUR SATELLITE KITCHENS AND FOOD TRUCKS WERE STILL SERVING REMOTE areas, as well as homes for the elderly, and finding they needed plenty of food. We were still making several thousand sandwiches each day, as we maintained a daily output of around thirty thousand meals.

  I took supplies to the mountains in Utuado, where chef Jeremy Hansen from Spokane, Washington, had been cooking in a school kitchen for two weeks. He left his restaurants—Santé and Inland Pacific—because he was watching the crisis and wanted to help. “Being home, and seeing what was happening, I didn’t feel there was a big enough response out here,” he said. “I felt really compelled to figure it out and do whatever we can. These are things I’ve been wanting to do my whole life. It’s a huge part of why I love to cook. It’s life-changing in many ways. Look at the people here; they are amazing.”

  Hansen was producing a few hundred meals a day until he did a local radio interview about his community kitchen. The next day he served 4,480 meals as people lined up outside. He was also getting higher up into the mountains, where the people found it hard to get to a place like his kitchen, especially if they were poor and elderly.

  But what about his restaurants back home? How were they doing? “They’re going to be fine,” he said. “I’m in contact with my friends there. It’s routine. They’re doing their thing. The really amazing thing is I almost don’t care actually. I wish I could do stuff like this forever. It’s better than anything.”

  Hansen was like my other chef partners: he was inspired to do this all over again in the next crisis. In that way, Puerto Rico was the start of a whole new movement that could change food relief for years to come. “I’ve been cooking for twenty-five years and trying to do whatever to get a Michelin star,” he said. “But this is more meaningful than anything. I would love to keep doing things like this.”

  I drove on from Utuado to an even remoter town, where Erin heard there was someone in need of vital medical supplies. I found it hard to ignore these appeals, especially because I could also learn so much about the real situation in the interior. A forty-eight-year-old woman, Lilia Rivera, was seriously asthmatic and had run out of her basic inhalant, Advair. She had suffered a chemical spill at work and burned her lungs a few years earlier, and now she couldn’t breathe comfortably without medical help. Lilia’s town, Río Abajo, was entirely cut off from the rest of the mountainous area. A high concrete bridge spanning a ravine to the main road was washed away by the huge floods that swept down the mountain, three days after Maria made landfall.

  On the mainland, you can get Advair at your local pharmacy and pop it straight into a respirator. But the hurricane did not just cut Lilia off from her medicine. Her respirator needed electricity, and she was running it from her car, where the exhaust fumes were making her asthma worse. The coast guard had helped her earlier with new car batteries, but now she was out of Advair. To reach her, we had to park on the main road, climb down into the muddy riverbed, and walk across to the other side of the river where an improvised ladder had been tied to the broken concrete pillars supporting what was left of the forty-foot-high bridge. It looked like the remains of the bridge might collapse at any moment.

  On the other side, we hitched a ride to Lilia’s house farther up the hillside, where I gave her both the medicine she desperately needed and a few solar-powered lamps, including one that could also charge her phone. Her eyes popped out in amazement. She seemed frail: her breathing was heavy and she leaned on a walking stick. But the look of wonder and happiness on her face was unforgettable. “Thank you for all the joy you’ve brought and all the mouths you’ve filled,” she said.

  It started to rain hard, so we scrambled back down the hill to the bridge. We didn’t know if a flash flood would come roaring down the ravine and wash away what was left of our route home. As the raindrops grew bigger and bigger, we ran to the other side and got in our car for the drive back to San Juan.

  The night closed in, cloaking every home in darkness. Along the side of the ravine, I noticed a local bar open, in the dark, with a few people drinking cans of beer. We stopped to talk, and I gave them my remaining solar lamps to brighten up their evening. I also gave them some land crabs I bought earlier on the side of the road. Their faces lit up. I shared a beer with them and heard their stories about life in the dark, with no money, no clean water or good food. These moments were a special time to connect with the people of Puerto Rico, to understand their struggles, and what life was really like on the island. They hoped the power would return soon; they heard it was coming back, not too far away. But they were happy to survive: the river had washed away homes that were eight feet above the collapsed bridge, so they were drinking tonight as the lucky ones who made it.

  That can of beer was like nothing else in the world. It tasted of something you couldn’t find in San Juan or the mainland. It was the feeling of being alive.

  WE WERE THERE TO HELP FEED THE PEOPLE. BUT AS THE RECOVERY dragged on slowly, we were increasingly seeing other urgent, medical needs, simply because we were traveling across the island and communicating so widely about our work. Around the same time we helped Lilia, I met Dr. Juan Del Río Martín, a Spanish transplant surgeon at the Auxilio Mutuo hospital in San Juan. The hospital was built and run by the Spanish more than a century ago, and it proudly displays its Spanish heritage with flags and emblems across its older buildings. One of these is home to the transplant center, where my friend is director, and he works with his team on saving the lives of patients with advanced cancer. Like other hospitals, the Auxilio Mutuo had been hit hard by Maria, with extensive flooding and loss of power. Now, a month after the hurricane, it was struggling with a second wave of emergencies: a severe shortage of anti-rejection drugs to prevent transplanted organs being rejected by patients’ immune systems.

  This was so far out of my expertise, I didn’t know where to begin. How bad was the situation on the island if the doctors lacked such drugs? I could only think of emailing people with the very best connections, so I reached out to Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank in Washington, and Dr. Paul Farmer at Harvard. Jim and Paul co-founded Partners in Health in Haiti, a pioneer in low-cost, community-based health care across the world. If anyone knew how to solve this problem, it was them. They kindly jumped to it, putting me in touch with the senior staff at Boston Children’s Hospital.

  The children’s hospital was committed to helping Puerto Rico, sending multiple shipments of medications to the island, in partnership with several other groups. For their first shipment, they assembled four thousand pounds of medicines and supplies. They told me they had thought they were well connected to the medical needs of the island, but had no idea about this critical shortage at the transplant center. Dr. Del Río and his team were down to their last units of epinephrine, or adrenaline, which was essential to their surgery. But the full list ran to ten medications they urgently required. The situation was far worse than normal, the surgeon told me, because the hurricane had led so many patients to delay treatment even longer than usual. Patients were coming in with enormous tumors because they were so busy struggling with all the other basics of survival, they delayed their own care.

  The first shipment of essential transplant medicines arrived with the help of Direct Relief, an international medical nonprofit, just one week after I emailed Jim and Paul. Another, led by Jeffrey Akman, dean of medicine at George Washington University hospital in D.C., arrived a week later. I am an adjunct professor at the university and know the president and faculty well.

  When you see a humanitarian disaster, you can always help, even if this isn’t something you know anything about. The fierce urgency of now means you act today, not tomorrow.

  ALMOST TWO MONTHS AFTER MARIA, THERE WERE STILL, UNBELIEVABLY, parts of the island that looked exactly like the hurricane had ripped through them yesterday. At Humacao’s
small airport, on the island’s east coast, it was impossible to drive down the access road. It was still blocked by power and telephone poles and cables. For that matter, it was hard to walk down the road. You could only hope the electricity wasn’t restored in some places. A small hangar at the side of the airstrip bore witness to the force of nature: planes were casually hurled into the building and a helicopter was destroyed nearly beyond recognition: you could barely make out its shell. A few minutes away, cars were lined up for several blocks outside a local supermarket. They were expecting a delivery of water and food, so all normal life ceased while people waited for their chance to buy the basics of life.

  In Punta Santiago, where Maria first landed, the area was like a demolition site. Gas stations were flattened and homes abandoned. One elderly resident, Don Alfonso, lived in something that was both flattened and standing. You could see into his kitchen from the street because the entire front of his home had disappeared, along with most of his roof. All that was left was his bedroom, and the plastic over his head was leaking. After so many weeks essentially living outdoors, in what remained of his home, there was still no sign of a FEMA tarp. We promised to buy one ourselves to help him stay dry.

  We started delivering in this neighborhood as soon as we saw photos on social media of the sign the townspeople painted on the road at the end of Don Alfonso’s street: SOS Necesitamos Agua/Comida!! We Need Water/Food!! Imagine how desperate you need to feel to paint that message in the road, in the hope that a helicopter or plane sees it and comes to your rescue. We had a food truck here three hours after we first saw that plea for help. Soon we started deliveries of hot food to a nearby community center, but coming here always made me feel stupid. How could we all complain about our daily troubles when these people suffered so much, yet so quietly?

  One block away was a small nursing home that saw the worst of the storm surge. Within minutes the water quickly rose to four feet, threatening the lives of the five elderly patients inside. A neighbor broke open a window, tied one end of a rope around a concrete column at his house and attached the other end to each patient, to stop them from being swept away. He pulled the patients out to a ladder where they could climb to his second-floor balcony.

  Several weeks after their escape, these frail Americans were still sleeping on mattresses that had been soaked in seawater. Their beds were broken and black mold was growing on them, as it was inside many of the homes here. The nursing home manager Violeta Guerrera had no money to replace the beds, so I promised to buy them myself with money donated by my friends, the Milstein family, who have been coming to Puerto Rico for many years. I asked them if it was OK to use the money for something other than food and water, and they said yes: I could use it in any way that was necessary.

  This was America and people didn’t want our pity; they wanted our respect. And the way you show respect is to provide the things they need, when they need them.

  WE BEGAN TO FIGURE OUT A WAY TO RAMP DOWN FURTHER. THANKSGIVING was only a couple of weeks away, and we wanted to make one more big push to feed our fellow Americans. What better way to tell them America cared than with a plate of turkey? We also wanted to thank all our volunteers and partners with a big Thanksgiving dinner. Soon after, we would wind down our numbers to a low rate in just a handful of places.

  I visited Eva Bolivar in Vieques, the owner of Bili restaurant, and we agreed to reduce our daily meals to five hundred through the end of the month. She still needed help making her $6,000 mortgage each month, through the end of the year, and we promised to help get her restaurant back on its feet. Vieques would continue to struggle with its recovery, as gas supplies would stop abruptly and the islanders were forced to line up for hours waiting for the next shipment.

  Other kitchens would stay open longer. At the Hilton resort in Ponce, in the south, chef Ventura Vivoni was producing thousands of meals in a corner of the hotel’s vast kitchen to deliver in the mountains north of the city. People didn’t want to waste their precious gas so the food needed to travel to them. I promised Vivoni we would support him, even as we scaled back our production.

  As Thanksgiving approached, we neared an epic milestone: 3 million meals in the two months since the hurricane. Before preparing a turkey dinner for one thousand volunteers and their families, I wanted to see again some of the hardest-hit corners of the island, so I returned to Punta Santiago. The neighborhood had barely changed. The gas station was still destroyed and the electric poles, made of reinforced concrete, were still lying on the sidewalk, snapped like so many pencils. Outside the nursing home there was a pile of moldy mattresses, smelling like a blocked toilet. But inside, the patients were finally sleeping on something we all could recognize as a bed.

  On our drive back to San Juan, the road was blocked by a party outside a small Catholic church I had never noticed before. There was an inflatable Nativity scene on the roof, close to the sign above the door saying Parroquia Nuestra Senora del Carmen. Outside there was a band getting ready to play on a stage, and a giant barbecue of delicious chicken skewers and bacalaito fritters with salt cod. People were dancing and young families were eating together. Inside, a Puerto Rican flag hung behind the giant crucifix. Below, stuck to the wall, were handwritten signs that told the story of how this community had survived. Paz, peace. Perserverancia, perseverance. Humanidad, humanity. Vida, life.

  Pastor José Colón told me how the floodwater had risen above the pews, but you wouldn’t have known that from the freshly painted white walls. Behind the church, under blue tarps, he stored pallets and boxes of food to distribute to his community. The food came from private donations; he had asked for government help, but nothing came.

  I told him what we had done to feed the island, and he asked me a simple question.

  “Why did you come to Puerto Rico? Where did the idea come from?”

  I was, for once, at a loss for words.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have a plan. My idea was just to feed the people.”

  Epilogue

  WE HAD ALMOST 3 MILLION REASONS TO GIVE THANKS. THREE MILLION meals prepared for hungry Puerto Ricans by so many chefs—from the island and the mainland—and no less than 20,000 volunteers working across twenty-four kitchens and seven food trucks. We wanted to say thank-you with a special Thanksgiving dinner—that uniquely American meal—for our cooks, our partners and as many volunteers as we could fit around several long tables inside a conference room at the Vivo Beach Club.

  I introduced Eliomar Santana, from the church high up in the mountains of Naguabo, explaining how I heard about a pastor who wanted to cook and of course I would have said no, if anyone had asked me first. Now Eliomar had cooked tens of thousands of meals, and inspired us all. He said grace, giving thanks for us all, and we hugged.

  I warned everyone to be careful. “Okay, I cut myself already,” I said, “so please only let someone cut the turkey if they know how to use a knife.”

  I thanked as many chefs as I could name and all of those I couldn’t. I thanked our volunteers and our food suppliers, especially José Santiago. And I gave a huge thanks to José Enrique and his sister Karla for starting the whole story.

  “You know what happened? We needed a restaurant and they gave us their restaurant,” I said. “We needed a car park, and he got us a car park. And we began cooking sancocho, the best sancocho in the history of mankind. And we began making sandwiches, the best sandwiches with mayo in the history of humankind. And then in the parking garage we began getting food trucks. And we began getting paella pans. Paella pans! A crazy guy called Manolo came from Miami wanting to cook rice. He and his team have done hundreds of thousands of arroz con pollo, day in and day out. Chefs For Puerto Rico were so many people, but we needed angels, and the angels we had were food trucks. They came to us and we didn’t have gasoline, but we traded gasoline for food. And that’s good because we were feeding people.”

  Above all, I wanted to thank the people of Puerto Rico: all those struggling but
selfless communities who told us there were others who needed our help more than they did.

  “When you find people that generous, that’s when you really see the real beauty and meaning of the American phrase We the People. It’s not I the Person. That is the island of Puerto Rico. Thank you to Puerto Rico, thank you to the chefs for being part of this and for feeding so many people. Viva Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico se levanta!”

  We finished the only way I knew how: with the loudest singing of our anthem:

  Voy subiendo, voy bajando

  Voy subiendo, voy bajando

  Tu vives como yo vivo, yo vivo cocinando

  Tu vives como yo vivo, yo vivo cocinando

  You live like me, I live by cooking.

  HOW DID A BUNCH OF CHEFS AND VOLUNTEERS ACHIEVE SO MUCH IN such a short time? Because we weren’t just a bunch of cooks with great knife skills and the ability to conjure up great flavors. Restaurants are complicated businesses, and a great chef needs to be a great manager—not just of people, but of orders, supplies and inventory. If you can’t get the management right, it doesn’t matter how good a chef you are: your restaurant will fail. Those skills, it turns out, are incredibly useful in a disaster zone. David Thomas, executive chef at my Bazaar restaurants, was a perfect example of the kind of logistical genius you need to run these relief operations. In his day job, he oversees four $10 million restaurants, managing daily orders of 10,000 or even 20,000 items. Still, Puerto Rico was something else. “The sheer volume of things coming in the door was crazy,” he said. “And Puerto Rico doesn’t have the most reliable food distribution services. Unreliability was a big challenge. Everybody wants to say, ‘Yes, no problem, we will get the order.’ But then it doesn’t show up, which means at some point there’s a complete hole in production, which can’t happen.”