Volunteer at the First Baptist Church of Arroyo, Puerto Rico, 2018.

Photo by Danny Ellison

I remember that Wednesday morning, I tearfully told my husband Alexis: “Let’s go for a walk around town. I want to keep these images of Puerto Rico in my memory and heart because I know that nothing will be the same after Maria.”

And it was not the same. We woke up to a nightmare that lasted for months. A nightmare of a country without electricity, without water, without gasoline, without food, without a government, and sometimes… even without hope. But with friends, family, neighbors, and the community of faith… with God’s strength.

We lost 4,645 souls, and we are still in the recovery process.

We had to learn. We learned to preserve food, raise our voices, ration gasoline, wash clothes by hand, not settle, read chats, demand that we be treated with dignity, and live in solidarity with our neighbors.

I also learned. I learned about measurements, quotes, names of tools, and how to take care of my mental health with strategies to manage compassion fatigue. 

With our remaining strength, we rebuilt the country, one day at a time. We knew we only had ourselves. But we would quickly remember that we were not alone. God was always present.

In my case, I decided to save the pain and focus on rebuilding. There was no time to grieve as we needed to meet our immediate needs amid unprecedented shortages. In fact, I don’t have a single photo of Maria’s damage. I didn’t want to remember.

In May 2018, I changed jobs and accepted the task of coordinating the rebuilding efforts with American Baptist Home Mission Societies under the Rebuilding, Restoring, Renewing Puerto Rico initiative. As part of the orientation to the volunteers, I shared my experience with them so they understood the magnitude of the damage.

At that moment, I realized that it was the first time in eight months that I had stopped to describe the trauma I had experienced. I can confidently say that I gave the first twenty orientations through tears. But the more I told it, the less I cried. Telling my story became a healing tool. The volunteers who came to serve not only restored the lives of people in the homes they rebuilt, they also helped me restore mine.

This can be a metaphor for ministers. So many of us experience compassion fatigue or vicarious trauma from the type of tasks we do daily. Yet, amid the crisis, God provides healing spaces where a faith community emerges that sustains and accompanies us.

Nearly six years after the tragedy, we can say that we are now experts in disaster response. We demonstrated this in the disasters that followed (some natural, some not so natural), such as the resignation of the governor under mass protest in the summer of 2019, the 2020 earthquakes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and most recently with the impact of Hurricane Fiona in 2022.

Nothing is the same. We are no longer the same. But we are stronger, more resilient… more sensitive. So we keep healing, we keep loving, and we keep dreaming.