Rachael Carrell ’19 arrived for the fall semester at UVM after spending the summer in Puerto Rico working with a small, community-based organization in Mariana, a town on the East coast of the island. 

The organization, the Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo (Mutual Aid Project), grew out of the catastrophe left behind by Hurricane Maria which struck the island in September of 2017. Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo has the goal of combatting vulnerabilities in the community and becoming more prepared for future disasters. 

Carrell recently spoke with students in professor Pablo Bose’s GEOG 60 Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. class about her experience in Mariana. The town sits on mountains that boarder the Yabucoa Valley, where Maria made landfall. The already fragile power, communication and road infrastructure in the region broke down.

Carrell arrived last June for a stay that would last until mid-August. The day before she arrived, nearly nine months after Maria hit, the residents of Mariana got their power back for the first time since the hurricane. 

New Frontiers

Carrell applied to UVM on the advice of a family friend whose daughter had recently graduated. She visited campus for the first time during a UVM Accepted Student Day and immediately knew she found her academic home. 

“I was looking for a school with a student population more in the 2,000 to 4,000 range. But I was impressed by how faculty members interacted with students—they were really engaging and open.”

After graduating from high school in Seattle, she chose to defer her admission to UVM for a year to go on a self-designed gap year. Carrell’s ability to adjust to new situations and shifting priorities might be due to her experience as an independent traveler. She spent eight months traveling through South America, with stops in Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. During the eight-month trip she was mostly “wwoofing”—working on small family farms through the Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF) organization. 

She learned to travel light, improve her Spanish, and see first-hand how volunteer networks like WWOOF attract people and resources to remote regions in Latin America, all skills that came in handy during her time in Puerto Rico.

Carrell began her studies at UVM as an environmental studies major, and found life as a university student disconcertingly simple after spending eight months on the road. “I got this Cat-Card which I realized was a pass to food, transportation, laundry. I still had the travel mentality going, and I wasn’t used to have everything made so easily available to me.”

As a part of the ISEE (Integrated Studies of Earth and the Environment) first-year program she took a geography class taught by professor Beverley Wemple on water resources, which triggered a change in major to geography. She also developed GIS skills and an interest in how countries coped with disasters. Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm, provided a vivid and troubling case study of how catastrophes unfold.

Under the tutelage of faculty advisor Meghan Cope, Carrell decided to focus her senior thesis on the hurricane response and received funding to travel to Puerto Rico through the support of UVM’s Office of Fellowships, Opportunities and Undergraduate Research (FOUR). FOUR advisors helped her secure the Simon Family Public Research Fellowship stipend to support her work on the island with Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo, Mariana. 

In Country

Carrell settled into a house down the road from the local community center, established by residents as a place to gather and disseminate news, distribute meals, and problem-solve issues as diverse as water shortages and waste disposal. 

She spent most of her time doing ethnographic research for her thesis and using an open source GIS program (QGIS) to improve local maps to help create a better emergency response plan for the residents of Mariana. Her days were also spent helping out in the kitchen, orienting volunteers who showed up to help, or working in the community garden.

“Between emergency planning meetings and urgent short-term tasks that arose, you had to be pretty agile,” she said. “You’d be switching from one project to the next because things happen really quickly.”

Mariana benefited from having great leaders in their community. The two leaders of Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo Mariana, Christine Nieves and Luis Rodriguez Sanchez, were young, forward thinking and well connected through social media. Effectively broadcasting their situation to the Puerto Rican diaspora and other social and professional networks, they attracted aid and volunteers like Carrell to lend their expertise or donate. 

Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo Mariana was a purely local response to urgent local needs. It grew organically, drawing on the commitment of residents and volunteers. Carrell noted that absent from the planning process, or any discernable aid, was FEMA, the U.S. government agency created to provide emergency relief. The phrase “FEMA isn’t coming” voiced by many villagers also had a galvanizing effect—if the people didn’t help themselves, no one would.

In an interview with NPR this summer, Nieves said aid did not arrive until 12 days after the storm. When it came, it was in the form of tins of Vienna sausages, a 16-ounce bottle of water per family, and bags of Skittles. When more FEMA aid arrived later, it had to rely on the makeshift wi-fi service the village had already created on its own. 

“The residents decided to take matters into their own hands,” Carrell said. “They didn’t have the luxury of a choice. But the experience I appreciated the most was seeing people from all different professions and talents and age ranges working together on the same project, using what they had. It was beautiful to witness and to be a part of.” 

Under the tutelage of faculty advisor Meghan Cope, Carrell's thesis will explore the policy shortcomings that led to the failed government response to Maria in Puerto Rico. She cites the failure to lift the Jones Act (an arcane piece of World-War II legislation meant to protect American marine shipping from foreign competition) along with many other factors that exacerbated the impacts of the storm and delaying desperately needed aid.

She’s also studying how the debt crisis in Puerto Rico and the deteriorating infrastructure made the island even more vulnerable to a catastrophe of this magnitude.

“When we talk about 'natural disasters' we think of an ‘impact event,' such as a hurricane, followed by a brief recovery process and a return to normalcy," Carrell explains. "That’s not how catastrophes operate. They stem from vulnerabilities that are produced over long periods of time, often going unnoticed by many. In the case of Puerto Rico, a heightened state of vulnerability produced over decades and centuries, set the conditions for Maria to unfold a horrendous catastrophe. This means, that in order to really recover, they need to address root problems.”