All posts tagged: Puerto Rico

Volun-tourism on the Island of Enchantment (Abandonment)

We like to go somewhere warm over the winter break but decided this year that, given the suffering caused by hurricanes, it would have to be where our dollars and time would do some good.  Research led us to Vieques, a beautiful island off of Puerto Rico; and an online community bulletin board hosted by island residents linked us to a host who would rent us an apartment and connect us to daily volunteer work.  What we found was that Puerto Rico, known as “Isla del Encanto,” or “Island of Enchantment,” could instead be called the “Island We Abandoned.” A Christmas day flight to San Juan was barely half-filled, testament to the collapse of the tourism industry.  San Juan International showed little effect of the storm until we passed a destroyed hanger, a skeleton of a building.  The flight to Vieques was more revealing – flying over towns one saw blue-topped home after blue-topped home, the color being the tarps that three months after the storm serve as roofs.  The island is verdant, but some …