NORTHAMPTON — Gesmarie Perez Santiago was both frazzled and buoyant as she emptied her refrigerator, pausing only to push back her frizzy blonde hair as she hastily stuffed frozen meat, cans and vegetables into shopping bags.
The moment was a happy one despite the inherent awfulness of moving. After five months of living in temporary housing in Northampton — through a bitterly cold winter, not to mention getting used to a new city and language — Santiago and her family were relocating to a home that feels more permanent.
“The only thing missing is family,” she said in Spanish as she looked around her new apartment in Hampshire Heights on Wednesday morning, noticeably holding back tears as she talked about her parents and other loved ones back at home in Puerto Rico. “The warmth of family.”
Santiago, 37, and her two sons, Jesus and Esteban, are part of a group of as many as 30 Puerto Rican families who, having fled the island in the wake of hurricane devastation, ended up in the Quality Inn and Suites hotel on transitional aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
As many decry an anemic federal response to Hurricane Maria and the humanitarian crisis it created, local communities have stepped into that gap — both on the island and where the displaced have arrived on the mainland. In Northampton, nearly every family from the Quality Inn has found housing — a feat thanks in no small part to the many local figures who make up the city’s social safety net.
“The transition hasn’t been easy, but they’ve made it so much easier. We’re so fortunate,” Santiago said of the help she has received. “There are more than 20 families, and they have worked with all of them.”
Much of the assistance the families have received has been channeled through the hotel, the school system and the local family resource center. Two names in particular consistently rise to the surface when speaking to those involved in the process of settling the families: “the two Kellys.”
That would be Kelley Knight, an outreach social worker at Northampton Public Schools, and Kelly Thibodeau, assistant program manager at the Bridge Family Resource Center — a program of Clinical Support and Options, the mental health and social services organization. The work the two have done assisting the families ranges from helping them navigate the complex bureaucracy in applying for public housing to holding open hours at the Quality Inn to answer questions.
On Wednesday, the two were working as movers together with Anne Barnes, a family support worker at the resource center. They lugged Santiago’s family’s furniture and boxes out to their cars, transported them across the city and unloaded them before jetting off to Hadley, where they were helping another family move to Greenfield.
“It all depends on where we can find housing,” Knight said when asked why the families have moved to different cities and apartment complexes, from Greenfield to Springfield. “It’s nothing short of miraculous that we’ve found so much permanent housing.”
The Amherst-based Bridge Family Resource Center is part of the state’s network of family resource centers and has been the overarching case managers for the families. The organization is part of a state-wide task force meant to aid the Puerto Rican arrivals.
“Really what’s important for us is not telling families what they need, we’re letting them tell us what they need,” Thibodeau said.
That includes addressing medical needs, financial support around housing and mental health issues, especially considering the trauma many of the families have been through after the hurricane.
“Through the support of the Franklin Hampshire Career Center, we have also been working on employment with a number of families,” Thibodeau said.
Knight’s role demonstrates the central part Northampton’s school system has played in ensuring the families are properly accommodated in the region.
“I think that the school has been the point of contact for these families in connecting with the resources that are available within the region, and has sort of been an anchor for them as they’ve dealt with the very difficult process of moving from temporary housing to more permanent housing in a kind of transition that none of them had planned or wanted to have to experience,” Northampton Superintendent John Provost said.
Twenty-four students have entered the city’s school system this year as a result of Hurricane Maria, and the district’s registrar, Jennifer Towler, said the most difficult challenge has been to find their families housing.
The families were recipients of “transitional sheltering assistance” from FEMA, which originally was set to expire in mid-January. That deadline was pushed back several times, however, and will now last until May 14, with another eligibility review in mid-April. Hundreds of families across the state have received that aid to stay in hotels, including large contingents in Holyoke and Springfield.
Many families remain uncertain what comes next if they lose that sheltering assistance. Thibodeau said the Red Cross has provided the financial support needed to keep families who lose that aid in the hotels they currently call home, including a small number of families here locally.
But the program is meant to be temporary, and all that unpredictability continues to worry families and provide hurdles for relief efforts on the mainland.
“The FEMA stuff has been hard too because they keep changing the deadlines, and it just takes a long time to get approved for housing,” Towler said.
At first, Towler said, many people locally thought there would be more guidance from, and coordination with, federal agencies to help the families. But after waiting around for that leadership, they soon realized that little beyond financial assistance was coming.
“It’s really hard to have that trickle down to what’s going on on the ground,” Towler said.
Despite formidable action from the region’s agencies and leaders, however, many displacees in local hotels feel forgotten by the outside world as they continue to face trauma in the wake of Hurricane Maria, according to Pastor Aida Villegas from Iglesia Dios Incomparable in Holyoke.
“FEMA’s support is ending and we do not have the answers we need,” Villegas said in a statement ahead of a public call for accountability on Thursday in Holyoke. “We are calling on the Puerto Rican community across the state and across the country — along with our allies — to join Puerto Rican leaders in Holyoke in mobilizing our voices and our votes to demand a real plan and solution to this crisis.”
In Northampton, Thibodeau, Knight, Quality Inn General Manager Shaun Leahan and an army of others, including many volunteers, have worked tirelessly to patch whatever holes exist in the federal safety net.
“There’s been a lot of people involved,” Towler said.
Catholic Charities and Casa Latina, for example, have given aid to the families. The local soup kitchen and local restaurants have provided meals, as has the food recovery program from the cafeterias at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The hotel has been heating up food for the families because they have no cooking equipment in their rooms. Volunteers have brought the families donations, including furniture and winter clothing.
“We are the only hotel out of the ones that I’ve spoken to that are providing this amount of assistance to the evacuee families,” Leahan said. “We’ve had moments when we’ve been completely daunted, wondering how we’d be able to do this.”
The hotel isn’t the only institution that has dealt with unexpected difficulties arising from the families’ arrival.
Provost said the sudden addition of so many students to the school district — none of whom were part of the Oct. 1 student count that determines education funding from the state — has resulted in budgetary strains. The district has overspent on translation services this year, and has added English as a second language teachers and paraprofessionals into next year’s budget.
School districts have been given a code to report displaced students from Puerto Rico in their student information systems, but Provost said additional aid the state promised for those students has lagged several months behind the district’s expenditures.
Provost said the district’s response was based on similar efforts from the last time he saw a large arrival of displaced students to the state: Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And with climate experts predicting increasingly powerful hurricanes — and with increasing frequency — the support provided now may unfortunately provide a template again in the future.
“That’s two major storms in the course of what, 15 years?” Provost said. “I don’t have a crystal ball to predict the future, but it’s very possible something like this can happen again in the future.”
But Provost said the school community feels very fortunate to have the Puerto Rican students here.
“We feel that this has been an opportunity for us to really live out our core educational values and really demonstrate how welcoming we are as a public school learning community,” Provost said. “We are truly public schools … all you need to do is arrive in the city and we will educate you.”
That education is a big reason why Santiago is so excited to be able to stay in Northampton. Her 11-year-old son, Esteban, was able to go on a four-day camping trip with his Bridge Street Elementary School class, and Santiago said his teacher has been great about making him feel welcome and supported.
“I heard him speaking [English] with the teacher and he speaks great!” she exclaimed.
As for Jesus, the 19-year-old is now taking a full load of classes at UMass Amherst. He rides the bus there every day, continuing the education he began at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in the hopes of becoming a television producer one day.
“We’ve gotten ourselves established here in five months,” Santiago said in awe.
Santiago was standing in her new two-bedroom apartment in Hampshire Heights, imagining how she would decorate the room Esteban and Jesus will share, and picturing herself baking flan or cheesecake in the oven. It’s the first place she’s ever lived that has a washer and dryer.
Of course, not everything is easy. Santiago is taking English classes online and at the International Language Institute of Massachusetts, but the language is still difficult for her.
“I’m trying,” she said in English.
Santiago’s mother will soon join her in Northampton, and the whole family is visiting Puerto Rico this summer. She often text messages with her family back home, and speaks with her best friends every day.
But Santiago said she misses home. She longs to see her parents and to chat with her girlfriends. A smile filled her face as she described Puerto Rico’s nightlife, reminiscing about hanging out with friends, walking around and eating alcapurria — a popular fritter dish stuffed with meat.
Meantime, her family back home continues to face hardship. Their access to electricity remains infrequent, and rebuilding efforts will continue for a long time to come. Though Santiago and her family will visit Puerto Rico this summer, she said their future lies in Northampton.
“Obviously I still miss Puerto Rico, but I also feel like this is our new home,” her son Jesus said before rushing out to catch the bus to UMass.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.