POTTSTOWN >> Several efforts at The Hill School are now underway with one common goal – to get help to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.
Perhaps the largest got underway when Lisa Demetrio, who helps run the food services for Sodexo at the school, found out that her neighbor in the Cherry Tree Farms development in Upper Pottsgrove, Ty Solis, has family in Puerto Rico.
And he is trying to help.”I’ve got grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, a lot of relatives,” Solis told Digital First Media. They hail mostly from his father’s hometown, Patillas, located on the southeast portion of the island.
“The whole island is just a disaster, everything is destroyed,” said Solis, who spoke with a cousin still living there who managed to get to San Juan where she could get a cell signal.
“My aunt had a restaurant on the beach that was pretty famous. A lot of famous Puerto Rican singers would stop in town to eat there,” said Solis. “It’s now completely gone. There’s nothing left.”
So Solis is collecting donations – bottled water, canned goods, non-perishable foods, diapers and baby wipes, insect repellent, citronella candles, flashlights and D batteries, lanterns and other essentials – that will be shipped to Puerto Rico through an effort organized in Patillas called Patillenses Unidos Pro Fondos.
The donations will be loaded onto a shipping container being brought to a warehouse on West Cedar Street in Allentown. “It arrives Saturday and we’ll only have two hours to fill it and after that its $100 per hour,” said Solis.
(Anyone who wants to volunteer to help fill the shipping container, can call Solis at 215-933-9602 for more information.)
From there, the container will be trucked to New Jersey and put on a ship to San Juan.
In San Juan, it will be met by the mayor of Patillas, who has arranged for a police escort to take it to the town, he said.
Solis, who was last in Puerto Rico in June, has also received permission from his boss – Matt Hendricks at Sustainable Waste Solutions in Souderton – to take a few days to meet the shipping container and ensure its contents are properly distributed.
Until then, Solis is taking donations at his home – 56 Peach Tree Circle – and The Hill School is taking donations at the gatehouse off Beech Street until Friday.
On Saturday, Demetrio and Hill School Human Resources Manager Heather Gelting will drive it to the Allentown warehouse for loading.
“It’s really a blessing, I’m so grateful to The Hill School for what they’re doing,” Solis said of the students and his neighbor.
But that’s not all The Hill is doing.
Quintin Mastrangelo, a sixth form (senior) student at The Hill from Glenmore, and the president of the campus Young Republicans Club, is holding a bake sale Wednesday in the student center to raise money that will be used to buy more supplies to ship later this week.
And even former students are lending a hand.
Ian Stewart graduated from The Hill in 1996 with a classmate named Alejandro Calaf, who now lives in San Juan.
“He started posting about how hard it was to find potable water, about half the island has no drinking water,” Stewart told Digital First Media.
So Stewart created a “Water for Puerto Rico” Facebook page – www.facebook.com/groups/1124231261040252/ – to facilitate getting portable water filters, like the kind campers use, to those in Puerto Rico who need them.
The site also has a list of things most needed and Calaf can be contacted directly via that site.
“FEMA is doing a good job in the cities, but out in the hinterlands, they’re not getting supplies,” said Stewart.
That’s where Calaf comes in.He has a cousin with a moving company and they are taking trucks out into the country to distribute food, water and other necessaries.
“You can just go on Amazon and have it shipped right to the moving company,” said Stewart. “UPS started shipping to Puerto Rico today, and FedEx and the postal service are already making deliveries,” he said.
