Beauty and brokenness

PHOTO ESSAY BY DANIEL DELGADO

Most people know Puerto Rico as the island of enchantment. It’s beautiful. But underneath that beauty, there are so many people who are broken and lost.

By Jonathan Santiago A lthough many are very religious because of the island’s catholic background that connects to our Spanish heritage, Puerto Rico is mostly lost.

People in Puerto Rico are just desperate. They don’t know how to handle what’s happening to them. Natural disasters did not create the mental health crisis in Puerto Rico. It just revealed the crisis that was underneath the surface.

But that hopelessness and lostness are no match for the hope we find in Christ.

That’s why we’re here. We see the hopelessness; we see the lostness. And we know the gospel is the only solution. People in Puerto Rico struggle every day, and that’s where Send Relief comes in. We want to bring hope, and we know that hope comes through a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Our volunteers that come from Southern Baptist churches are selfless. They could choose to go somewhere else, but they choose to come back. And they choose to be here in Puerto Rico to serve these families who are still struggling.

But the story doesn’t end there. We couldn’t do this without people sacrificially giving.

When you give, it allows us to not just rebuild a roof. It allows us to have an impact in the lives of people. That’s what I’m seeing all over the island, and that’s what I want the whole world to see.

Jonathan Santiago is a Send Relief missionary.

We’ll continue building roofs because we know that what Send Relief does is not about the roof. It’s about the people under the roof.

We have teams coming from churches all over, and we’ve seen many volunteer teams that have been here two, three and four times because they’ve fallen in love with the people.

What breaks my heart about what Maria and the earthquake did to Puerto Rico is not the property that was damaged. We can always fix the property. What’s heartbreaking is what it did to our people.”

It doesn’t matter what any kind of crisis does to our lives. We can find hope in Christ. And that’s what I’m seeing all over the island—that Jesus Christ is our hope.” Jonathan Santiago

We’re seeing people being transformed and people hearing the gospel for the first time.