An old colleague told me she dips a bucket into her cistern to draw the water out and then heats it on her gas stove. Two other friends who don’t have that luxury asked me to bring them a portable, solar-powered camping shower along with as many C and D batteries as I could stuff into my carry-on.

The feeling of normalcy that could be achieved by something routine like returning to work each day is impossible for many. The charter boats they worked on sank. The hotels they worked in are unable to open because they were too severely damaged. My friends are waiting for power to be restored to the shopping center where their restaurant is located so they can start selling food again and make a living.

The Caribbean is supposed to offer isolation, but not like this.

On three separate occasions, locals asked me plaintively, “Are you FEMA?” Seeing my notebook and pen, they assumed I was someone official in a position to expedite the relief they had been waiting for — a tarp for their sheared-off roof, a personal hygiene kit, an answer to a question like when trash pickup would resume.

Jeff Miller, who lives in one of the most far-removed sections of St. John, Coral Bay, described what it’s like after dark. “There’s no sound,” he said to me. “There’s no CNN. There’s no Weather Channel. There won’t be for months. I have no idea who won the football game last night. I don’t even know if Donald Trump is still the president.”

Then there is the sense of political powerlessness that residents feel. I always observed that Virgin Islanders resentfully saw their status as American-in-name-only. The only elected representation in Washington for these 103,000 citizens is a nonvoting delegate to Congress. They cannot vote for president. The same is true for Puerto Ricans. And as is also the case with Puerto Rico, the island is overwhelmingly nonwhite — nearly 80 percent of Virgin Islanders are black.

“They’re not really on the radar,” Sally Jewell, the Interior secretary under Barack Obama, told me. When she would try to get members of Congress to take notice of local issues in the Virgin Islands, she recalled, she would be met with incredulity: “They would say, ‘We’re here to focus on the United States.’ And I’d say, ‘They are the United States.’ ”

The Virgin Islands was relatively lucky in the sense that it suffered only a handful of deaths from the storms. But doctors I spoke with who are assisting the islands’ overburdened health care system said the aftereffects are starting to show in people who are hurting themselves while cleaning out what remains of their houses or letting wounds go untreated because they cannot get to a clinic. Their driveway might still be blocked, or their car smashed.