WEBVTT

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- So I have been to Puerto Rico many times.

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I was actually born there.

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My family moved to the States when I was really little,

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but I grew up spending every summer on the island.

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As my plane kind of came in and landed into Puerto Rico,

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all I could think was it looked like

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a nuclear bomb had gone off.

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Trees that were once full and green and lush,

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kind of the staple of what Puerto Rico is known for,

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were completely destroyed and bare, debris everywhere,

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roads blocked off, bridges gone.

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Arriving there, everyone had heard, right,

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there is no power, Puerto Rico has no water,

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but you can't really grasp what that means.

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Half of the street signs are blown down because of debris,

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there's still light poles in the center of roads,

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but there's no street lights.

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There's also no traffic lights.

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If you get lost, you don't have a GPS to rely on.

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You can't pull out your cell phone. There is no service.

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Scary to think of a world where we're traveling back

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50 years and we don't have all of these comms and luxuries

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and what that world looks like

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when all of that is ripped out from beneath us,

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and that was exactly what happened.

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The Guard was literally doing everything

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that you could think of,

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from helping to clear roads and repair homes,

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to delivering emergency relief supplies,

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food and water, and delivering mail.

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We became a beacon of hope.

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People saw you and they saw you coming in uniform,

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and it was like a hope that things were gonna get better,

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that we were still there, that we were making a presence,

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and just our presence was a promise to not leave them alone.

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So we would load Blackhawks with pallets of supplies

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that we could then go in,

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there would be volunteers that would meet us there

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to pick up pallets of food and water

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and be able to distribute those out

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and to the people of thos municipalities.

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What we saw was a community that came together,

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that looked out for each other,

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and that took care of each other.

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They were more concerned about making sure that everybody

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had something versus trying to get more for themselves.

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One of the last missions that we did

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was a door to door distribution.

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So essentially we had this young man

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who couldn't have been more than about 12 to 13 years old,

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and an active member of the Civil Air Patrol,

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who was out working all day, uniform on, in the heat,

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sweating his butt off with the rest of us,

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when he himself was a victim of the hurricane.

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At the end of that mission,

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one of the airmen that I was actually working with

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gave him one of his morale patches,

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and thanked him for his work,

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and the impact that he was having,

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not only in his community,

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but as a future leader of this nation,

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and as a future leader of the Air Force,

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and just confirmed to him that

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that is exactly what our Air Force needs

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as we continue to move forward.

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I felt incredibly connected to that mission.

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This is where my roots are, this is where I came from,

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these are my people that are in great and dire need,

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and so you're incredibly motivated and inspired

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to get out there and to go above and beyond

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and to do whatever you can to even make

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the smallest of miracles happen,

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and it's so important to stay strong and level-headed

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because there's so many people

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going through so much more than you are,

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and at the end of the day,

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you have to be able to sort of decompress

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and put some of that away so that way

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you can go back out the next day and do it all over again.

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I am Staff Sergeant Michelle Alvarez-Rey,

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and I am the Colorado Air National Guard.