After Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, my family in the United States watched and read reports about the slow trickle of aid to people in need on the island. We knew that if food and water weren’t getting to big cities like San Juan and Bayamon fast enough, the situation in Loíza, the small municipality of less than thirty thousand where we come from, was likely to be worse. An uncle in Miami, Jon Piñeiro, decided, like many other Puerto Ricans in the wake of the storm, that he would make a trip to the island to bring supplies and generators to our family himself. “You should come too,” he texted me. Another uncle from Tampa, David Lanzo, whose daughters I kept in close contact with during the storm, decided to join. So did a cousin in Massachusetts, Rafael Lanzo, whose parents still live on the island.

We pooled money together, reached out to friends, and started a Generosity fund-raising page. By the time we secured a flight to Puerto Rico, after three delays and rebookings, we had collected enough money and supplies to bring help for the larger community in Loíza. We shipped two boxes of supplies ahead of our trip, and, the night before the flight, we filled more with diapers, canned food, medicine, batteries, flashlights, mosquito repellent, and tampons. We weighed each one to make sure that it was under the airline’s weight restriction (for cargo heavier than fifty pounds, the prices increase dramatically). Boxes of water were too heavy to ship, so we packed individual bottles and half cases into our luggage when we could, and put together one hundred-pound box of water, which would cost two hundred and twenty-five dollars to take. That’s two dollars and sixty cents a bottle—better than the three dollars my cousin in Loíza said people were charging on the streets. We took a break from packing to watch the viral video of San Juan’s mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, standing at a podium with a grave look on her face and raising a white flag to the rest of the world. She criticized the federal government’s slow response to a crisis that has left over three million American citizens lacking access to basic needs like clean water and electricity. “We’re dying here,” she said. We read President Trump’s tweets in response, saying that Cruz had been persuaded by Democrats to treat him “nasty.”

At Miami International Airport the next morning, we showed up with nine boxes of supplies and five generators. We spent close to three thousand dollars on cargo charges, then boarded a flight full of passengers on similar missions to get necessities into the hands of loved ones. As we headed down the aisle to our seats, David helped a woman whose knees buckled as she tried to lift a carry-on bag with canned food into the overhead compartment. When we neared Puerto Rico, people craned their necks toward the windows. I asked Jon, who had the window seat, what it looked like. “So far, not too bad,” he said.

I had the same thought as we walked through the San Juan terminal. The A.C. was on, the toilets flushed, and the gift shop was open and selling flags and rum and coffee—provided you could pay in cash. But by the time we reached the baggage-claim area the air had turned hot and thick, and filled with the stench of sweating bodies. We waited for close to an hour before the conveyor belt sputtered out one bag. It made three rounds, then the machine died again. The rest of the bags piled up at the entrance of the belt, and Rafael jumped up and pulled out bag after bag, handing it to the person behind him and creating a human conveyor belt. When there was no luggage left and our boxes still hadn’t appeared, we asked a tired attendant to look up our cargo’s status. Then the power in the entire airport died and the worker threw up his hands. He’d call us the following day, he said.

As we drove a rented minivan to my cousin Marivette’s house, in the nearby town of Canovanas, we passed a toppled water tank. A Burger King sign was splayed across the parking lot. As the sun set, the only lights that came on were from cars on the road and on the shoulders of the highway, where passengers parked to look for a cell-phone signal.

Marivette and her family sat in lawn chairs outside her small one-story home. Part of her covered patio had been blown off by the storm. She said that her family was sleeping on mats laid out in the portion that remained covered, because the interior of the house was too hot. I caught up with my nine-year-old cousin Yahed. In August of 2016, we’d gone to the beach together in Piñones and he’d showed off his rapping skills and bragged about how popular he was at school. He had less to say this time. Mostly, he and his two teen-age sisters looked bored. They hadn’t been to school since Hurricane Irma, and had spent most of their time since then holed up inside. Before I left, he told me he’d persuaded his mother to drape a blanket across the front, street-facing gate of the patio at night, so that he could have more privacy as he slept. “I woke up the other morning and saw the neighbor across the street staring at me,” he said.

On the drive to Loíza, we saw downed power lines and posts on the sides of the road, spilled one after another like dominoes. The sidewalks and yards of homes were strewn with pieces of aluminum, chair limbs, moldy sofas, and tree branches. A gas station had a pump missing and a roof like a crumpled paper ball. We stopped at my cousin Denisse’s house to deliver food and water, and she told us about the conditions at the local school where she works as a social worker. It had been turned into a shelter, she said, and the only food that people were receiving was cans of salchichas, or sausage, and a few crackers. There was no water for the toilets to flush, and people were beginning to develop skin diseases.

That night, we crashed at the house of my great-aunt Dora Correa, a small, spectacled woman with a puffy afro, and her wiry husband, Rafael Lanzo, Sr., known as Rafi. Rafi will turn seventy soon, but he still prides himself on doing pushups, pull-ups, and sit-ups every morning, and he spends hours in his back yard tending to a garden and a trove of rabbits he raises. Maria killed ten of his rabbits, and left only a papaya tree standing in his garden. During the storm, the winds ripped out Dora and Rafi’s bedroom window, and as Rafi tried to close the bedroom door behind him a gust of wind shut it on his finger and sliced off the tip of his thumb. He showed me the piece of flesh swimming in a pill bottle full of alcohol. “Some crazy shit, right?” he said.