After Hurricane Irma, I volunteered at the San Juan Convention Center for a few days. The center was welcoming refugees from the nearby islands and I had the pleasure in assisting. You can read about that blog here.

 

 

Post Hurricane Maria, there have been a lot of nonprofits and organizations that are on the island to assist with what happened. No matter what you do, the people of Puerto Rico need your help and if you can help in any way, that will be amazing.

As you might be aware, there are thousands of people that are stranded in the middle of the island. The roads have been blocked and the logistic to get clean water, food, supplies have been very difficult. I heard from one FEMA staff that there are about 5000-10,000 refugees in different locations and I had the pleasure to help some of the refugees by making sandwiches with World Central Kitchen.

My friend Marimerce told me one morning if I would be interested in making sandwiches at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico. The last time I was there, I was there for a Carlos Vives concert about 6 weeks ago. The concert was amazing and it was so much fun. This time around, I went there to make sandwiches.

 

 

There were around 10 volunteers there and we had to make 10,000 sandwiches for the next day. It was not as easy task to make that many sandwiches, but we worked efficiently and diligently and were able to hit that number around 5pm in the afternoon. Let me remind you some people started around 9am in the morning and there were volunteers coming in and out at all times. The sandwiches were quite basic with ham and cheese or potato salad, but at least the refugees were getting something to eat. I tried the sandwiches myself and they were pretty good. We mixed the batches together and made them with love. We were really happy to reach our milestone of 10,000 sandwiches for the next day and we all felt really great.

 

 

Manual labor can be one way to volunteer, but if you are interested in making monetary contributions, this can be feasible as well. There are many organizations that are accepting donations, but I definitely recommend to check carefully before you donate. You want to make sure that the monies go to the right organization and that they will make immediate impact.

 

 

One legit organization is Habitat for Humanity. I’m sure you have heard of them. They are a non-profit organization where they build housing for low-income folks. In Puerto Rico, Habitat for Humanity for Puerto Rico is quite active and they are going beyond their nonprofit work. Recently, Daddy Yankee decided to raise $1.5M USD to the Puerto Rico branch and this will be used to help the people that have been affected by the hurricane. Hence, if you do want to make a monetary contribution, you can check out their website at https://www.habitat.org/us-pr/san-juan/puerto-rico-hfh. You can help out as a volunteer or donate money directly.

On Tuesday November 7, Habitat for Humanity Puerto Rico will be giving out shelter repair kits to the people of the Caguas community. The municipality of Caguas have handpicked people that have been affected by the hurricane and we will be giving out kits to about 800 people.

I will be writing more about that day separately.