VIEQUES, Puerto Rico — Marciana Encarnación Caraballo, 101, lives alone in her house that overlooks Isabel Segunda, one of the two main population centers on the island of Vieques, and the Puerto Rican mainland.
She fell and nearly broke her leg in August 2016 while she was trying to close her bedroom window. Encarnación was still in serious pain when Hurricane Maria ravaged Vieques on Sept. 20.
Encarnación did not have electricity for more than three months after Maria. She also tried to take her life in October by refusing to eat the food and drink the water that neighbors had left for her outside her front door.
Encarnación on Wednesday was lying on a couch on her front porch when Manuel Silva, a lifelong Vieques resident, arrived with Wilfred Labiosa and Grissel Bonilla, co-founders of Waves Ahead, an organization that has provided assistance to LGBT Puerto Ricans and other vulnerable groups. Rev. Julie Johnson Staples, executive director of Intersections International, a New York-based ministry that is LGBT-affirming, and two of her group’s members, Marcia Fingal and Christine Nelson, were also with them. Read more via Washington Blade