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Virginia Woman's Personal Crusade to Aid Puerto Rico

This month, Elizabeth Alvarez, a nurse from Charlottesville, continues her one woman campaign to help Puerto Rico. 

The UVA trauma nurse set up a GoFundMe page and raised enough money to buy and fill a shipping container. Then, she and several volunteers left home to meet the shipment in a small mountain town where many of her relatives live.

Their first challenge – battling terrible traffic outside the airport in San Juan.

“There’s no power, so there are no street lights, so everybody is just going," she recalls. "There are no signs to figure out where you’re going.  I was lost, we were lost multiple times.”

And with no cell service, GPS on her phone was useless.  In Patillas,  a town of 19,000 people, she found no running water. So Alvarez and her friends drove two hours to a store that would only sell one case of bottled water per person.

“Three of us went in, and we literally kept going back and forth.  We would buy a case, take it out, go back and get in line and buy another case, and we did that two days in a row to be able to buy water for the people who needed it,” Alvarez explains.

Locals also begged for bug spray, as mosquitoes gathered around tubs of rainwater. They were desperate for pet food, tarps to cover homes as rooves were repaired and solar-powered lights.

“When I was giving solar lights to people, you would have thought they had won the lottery they were so excited to have just one light bulb in their house at night,” she says.

She’s also collecting toys for her next trip to the island in late December.

“Parents are worried about basic needs, so we have people collecting toys to be able to donate to those kids during the holiday time.”

She’ll take her own children with her on the next visit but doesn’t plan to buy them presents.  This, she says, will be a Giving Christmas, and giving feels even better than getting.  

Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief