Sep 25
"When [canvasers] identified medical needs or homebound folks, they would give us a call and we would provide our own care to go climb the stairs and make house calls to folks. Checking on someone or going around making prescriptions. We evacuated some people to the hospital if people needed to go. The main concern when we got here was 'were people dying on the up on the 20th floor because there’s no one checking on them and they can’t get down?'"
Jul 31
"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
"Here, there were people bringing food every day, I can’t complain. Here there is everything for those that are poor. I don’t usually take anything. Here in America everything is good and the consideration is extraordinary. In America this is always the case. This would never have been the case in Ukraine. The degree of humanitarian care and consideration towards people is incomparable. There was no regard or respect towards elder people in Ukraine. Here I have an apartment. Here there are opportunities and resources available to those who work and put in the effort."
Jul 24
"As a result of the hurricane we had cracks in the walls. FEMA didn’t pay too much attention to that, they said it’s personal, but it’s Projects here so they (management of building) need to take care of it and FEMA isn’t responsible. And we were registered and my daughter signed us up."
Jul 24
"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
"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."
Superstorm Research Lab 