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Small Puerto Rican island still struggling six months after Maria

"Pretty soon the next hurricane season will be here and we're not even standing up," said a doctor in Vieques.
Credit: Bianca Graulau
Mariana, Humcacao, remains without power four months after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico.

Planes are flying into Vieques, Puerto Rico, and the ferry is running again.

The small island of 9,000 people is open for tourists, but beyond the crystal blue water of its beaches, there's need.

Lisa Young and Gale Pearson have see it first-hand almost every day.

In the last six months, they have been literally trying to keep people alive.

The two volunteer nurses mobilized to get patients life-saving equipment like breathing machines, but that wasn't enough.

“We lost people because there was no fuel for the generators,” Young said.

Some people committed suicide, others ran out of insulin or didn't get dialysis in time.

When asked if some of her patients’ deaths were preventable, Dr. Ivette Pérez said, “Of course. Too many deaths that were preventable.”

Their fear is that they're not done burying people because of Maria.

“They just put in this whole new section,” Young said pointing at a local cemetery. “This was never here before Maria.”

They still lose power often, and the island's hospital is condemned because of black mold.

“Pretty soon the next hurricane season will be here, and we're not even standing up,” Pérez said.

But against it all, the volunteer nurses, who are also Vieques residents, say they’ll keep helping their neighbors.

From feeding the man who's squatting in an abandoned house because his was destroyed, to listening to the woman who watched her husband die gasping for breath without an oxygen tank, they say they will be there, even if it is just to let them know someone cares.

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