Food | Superstorm Research Lab

Aug 5

Interview with Rockaways hub volunteer & canvasing coordinator

"Volunteers would say, 'oh, she doesn't need that much stuff. People are lying to get more stuff and hoard it,' which is upsetting to see, especially because in the beginning, there were more donations than we could have ever given away. But pretty quickly sort of all these internal politics and--- maybe what I would think of as fear of people who are poor or fear of people who need stuff, you know? That was all coming out and being expressed in ways that weren't great by volunteers. So it's hard to talk to people in their apartments and feel like we didn't have the capacity to bring them things, but also knowing that they were going to come and have to wait in a line that you would not want anybody to have to wait in."

Jul 31

Interview with resident of Coney Island

"Well I’m not particularly close to anyone in my building even though I’ve been here 12 years there’s one woman who lives across from me who I consider like a mother. I look out for her but when the storm happened we started looking out for each other. We were like what do you need, you need water, you need this, whatever we had somebody could have. I was giving people money, I saw people who lived on the first floor, if I had an extra $5 or $10 I’d give it to them, they needed something to eat I would give it to them because I had money so I didn’t mind."

Jul 24

Interview with home health-care worker, Coney Island

" I can’t see any problems. I mean, you have to find people who lives on the first floor. Because that’s what they have really problems, you know because my gentleman he lives on the 6th floor and the lady lives on the-- I don’t, she lives on the second floor. They didn’t suffer a lot. But her friend, she’s 91 or 92 she lives on the first floor, she was flooded, I don’t know how she didn’t have powder dust, you know."

Jul 24

Interview with James Rose, Occupy Sandy volunteer

"And then I was asked what can I do and they had orientation so I went -- there’s this one guy that was there that told us if you’re going to go out into the field this is the way you should behave because these people where they live has been destroyed and be considerate and think about them and don’t take pictures, be considerate this is their space, you’re coming there to help them not -- it’s what do they need you know? Not like what you want to do. Yeah it was pretty cool. One guy from comms came down and said to my group of people that I was going through the orientation with and he said "does anybody here have a cell phone or a laptop" and I said "I have a cell phone" and he’s like "can you come with me we need someone to answer the hotline.""

Jul 24

Interview with Alyssa Durnien, full time volunteer and affected resident, New Jersey

"When I first started, I thought it was going to be a couple of weeks. Now it's more feeling it's going to be over a year at least. I'd like to see people getting back into their houses feeling more comfortable coming and getting the services that we're offering. But the numbers are increasing, not decreasing. And that's kind of eye opening...we are not back to normal and everyone thinks we are. They think that the storm is past and the damage should be over. And there's houses in this community that haven't even been touched yet. And there's, you know, people just starting the cleaning process. And it's six months later, so now they're tackling mold and mildew and a lot of other issues that we didn't think existed prior."

Jul 24

Interview with Edward Malave, New Church International, Coney Island

"We have the Verrazano Center Rotary Club is working with us. We have the Red Cross was able to give us a couple -- a truck full of assistants. City Harvest is going to work with us also bringing us material and food, a lot of food for the families. Last -- we have been providing food at an average of 100 families per day. And we do give on a weekend, you know like, on a Saturday easily we could give 250, 300 boxes of food to the people. And interestingly enough people are still learning that we are here so we are still getting a lot of new people that didn’t know that we were here."

Jul 24

Interview with Ethel, woman in line for food and water in Coney Island

"Because I learned from my mother to make the light with olive oil and water, the transformers were going boom, boom, boom. My granddaughter said to me, grandma, grandma put your bathing suit on, put your bathing suit on. She said we’re gonna go swimming grandma -- I said I am praying, I am praying. You know and then I applied for FEMA and they said because I have high blood pressure and I have -- I was diagnosed with -- I was in the hospital I was going crazy, I don’t have no -- I didn’t have no medication I couldn’t do anything."