On the southeastern shore of this island, where Hurricane Maria made landfall two months prior, the rushes of the Caribbean lash the disintegrating establishment of Jose Morales' battered ocean side home.
A year prior, the Morales family commenced the occasions in Yabucoa with a vast open air assembling that included turkey and a conventional pig broil. Not this year.
"This year there will be no Christmas," says Morales, who is 74 and lawfully visually impaired. "The individuals who can will appreciate the occasions. We can't. We'll be here. Living in fear, in threat."
Up the street, his sister Paula Morales, 67, sits in a plastic seat - one of two household items in her front room - under the blue plastic canvas that has supplanted her rooftop. A little painting of a jokester, one of only a handful couple of things she rescued after the tempest, holds tight the divider.
Around evening time, Morales sits by candlelight or the glare of her battery-worked light and tunes in to the smashing waves. The greater part of her possessions lie in a heap outside what's gone out.
"I can't consider the occasions at this moment," she says, eating white rice and red beans from a little plate. "I have excessively numerous stresses."
A marathon period of party
For some Puerto Ricans, Thanksgiving is generally the begin of a marathon period of celebration that finishes around January 6 with Three Kings' Day, when families hold happy social events and kids leave shoe boxes brimming with grass - the likeness treats for Santa - for the astute men's camels.
"The way we celebrate ... isn't (simply) Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's," said Cynthia García Coll, an instructive clinician who lives in Dorado, close to the capital city of San Juan. "It's consistently. You have cousins on another piece of the island. So the following end of the week the entire family goes to the opposite side of the island."
Tropical storm Maria's attack on the island has changed all that.
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Quite a bit of this US region, from urban focuses to rustic villas, still needs power and running water. Indeed, even San Juan endures periodic power outages caused by the devastation of an obsolete power lattice. The tempest pounded an island whose 3.4 million natives were at that point thinking about joblessness and neediness.
Indications of the obliteration are all around. Still-clammy heaps of garbage and individual things lost to the tempest. Brought down utility shafts and trees. Covered schools and organizations.
There is the perpetual buzz of crisis generators, and the steady possess an aroma similar to the diesel fuel that forces them. Blue, officially sanctioned canvases cover harmed rooftops like a system of Band-Aids.
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So this Christmas season, as their kindred Americans on the territory eat extra turkey and shop for presents, numerous Puerto Ricans will in any case be battling just to sustain and shield themselves.
"With Maria, the establishments of society - the wheels - tumbled off," says Dr. Domingo Marqués, a clinical clinician who lives in San Juan.
"Thanksgiving and Christmas, rather than being occasions, will be an update that we are still casualties," includes Marqués, whose house is still without control. "The occasions will be a trigger for injury for many people. I'm truly stressed over that.
"How are you going to feel on the off chance that you can't give your family an occasion?"
'We're fearing the occasions'
Early indications of the Christmas season are blooming over the island like the green shoots growing on trees stripped uncovered by Maria. Beautiful occasion signs and tinsel trees decorate a few homes and organizations. Folksy Christmas tunes boom from auto radios.
In spite of their numerous hardships, some Puerto Ricans are endeavoring to remain positive.
"There is no backpedaling to ordinary. It won't resemble some time recently. What's more, that is not really a terrible thing," says Marqués, the clinical analyst from San Juan. "We will be stronger. My child and my little girl will be more grounded than they should be. We will have more pride as a nation. We will be better."
"This could be the Christmas that advances Puerto Rico," concurs performer Roberto Silva, one of the island's driving backwoods troubadours. "The FEMA canvases are concealing a repulsive social and financial emergency. We need to discover a place amongst torment and bliss."
Yet, the obliteration created by Maria has even prosperous Puerto Ricans uncertain about how or what to celebrate.
"We're fearing the occasions," said García Coll, the therapist, who works in San Juan.
Notwithstanding settling on a place for Thanksgiving supper for around 30 more distant family individuals was an issue.
"No one has water," she says. "No one has power sufficiently stable to have the capacity to do it. We are the advantaged ones. We have significantly more than whatever is left of the island. We're not spending Thanksgiving Day as a family - which is truly a misfortune as of now. What's more, we're taking a gander at Christmas, and we have no clue what do."
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The Christmas season in Puerto Rico is normally set apart by parrandas, a period regarded type of Christmas caroling in which families and companions accumulate and move from house to house, singing and moving. The meandering vocalists can arrive startlingly at painfully inconvenient times and regularly come inside to eat and drink before taking the gathering to the following home.
This year, those festivals will be more quieted. In any case, numerous Puerto Ricans say despite everything they're wanting to hold customary parrandas. Marqués says associates at the doctoral level college of brain research where he educates are anticipating taking the wandering gatherings to provincial mountain towns this Christmas season.
His collaborators additionally have been fund-raising to give sunlight based lamps and water filtration frameworks to individuals in the field, he says. Furthermore, they're attempting to induce stores to give toys for poor youngsters.
"They merit it," he says of sea tempest survivors in remote parts of the island. "We're the quote-unquote 'favored ones'... The general population in the mountains, in disengaged groups, they feel double-crossed. They feel furious. The administration isn't there."
A town battles
In Comerío, a town in the mountains of focal Puerto Rico, many inhabitants showed up Sunday in a driving precipitation for a pre-Thanksgiving banquet of dish pork, yellow rice and pigeon peas.
SOMOS Healthcare, a New York-based not-for-profit, supported the supper and set up lasting centers in two remote towns hit hard by Maria.
"Like never before, there is a requirement for the occasions," says Jose Antonio Santiago, Comerío's chairman. "There is an aggregate wretchedness that originates from an absence of the most essential necessities."
The primary crisis rooftop coverings from the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not touch base around the local area until the point when about two months after Maria hit on September 20, Santiago says. More than 1,600 homes in the town had rooftops harmed or overwhelmed completely, he says.
Around 1,470 individuals stay in covers all through the island, as indicated by the administration. In any case, Santiago says that consider doesn't bring with account the expansive number of uprooted occupants not living in covers.
"I have around 5,000 displaced people," he says. "You don't see them since they're remaining with relatives, companions and neighbors. That is two and three families in a single house without light or water."
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Santiago says detachments attempting to reestablish control on the island presently can't seem to land in Comerío, an insignificant 27 miles southwest of San Juan.
"The ease back recuperation has prompted enthusiastic exhaustion," he says. "The official figures don't mirror the truth on the ground."
'This Christmas will be extraordinary'
A short separation toward the northwest, in the uneven town of Corozal, 12-year-old Ian Nieves sits in the primary school that has protected his family since Hurricane Maria hit. He covers his eyes, battling back tears, as he tries to review his favors this Christmas season.
"This Christmas will be not quite the same as all others," he says.
Ian Nieves and his sibling Elian, 6, can't come back to their close-by home, which sits on a slope helpless against mudslides and remains gravely harmed.
Their school is as yet shut, so the young men spend their days riding bikes, shooting circles in the hot sun and playing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles table game. Their incredible grandma gets ready breakfast, lunch and supper in a side of the classroom she now calls home.
"I miss home so much," Elian says.
Ian reviews a year ago's vacation season, the parrandas and the vast spreads of sustenance that included customary treats of arroz con leche, rice cooked with coconut drain, sugar and flavors, and a coconut drain custard known as tembleque. "We had the entire family together," he says.
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The young men additionally miss three of their cousins - ages 6, 9, 13 - who survived the road yet left the island for Pennsylvania about a month after the tempest. Numerous Puerto Ricans have fled the island as of late to remain with relatives or in inns on the territory.
"I cried so much that day," Elian says. "I don't know when they'll be back."
Ian would like to get new garments for Christmas. Elian needs a bike and a juice mug to supplant the one - it was yellow, with a smiley confront - he lost in the tropical storm.
The more youthful kid says he as of late got a gift of new dress and shoes however gave some away to companions who required them more.
"They don't have anything," he says. "They lost everything in the tempest."
'If it's not too much trouble come see me for Christmas'
Over the island in Yabucoa, Jose Morales and his significant other Irma Torres survive a sloppy street in a yellow house where one room has no rooftop. The roofs in two different rooms seem near crumbling.
What's more, the constant sea waves are debilitating what is cleared out.
"The lower divider, by the ocean, is in peril is falling," says Morales, a previous angler who lost his visual perception 12 years prior. "It alarms me during the evening. I hear the waves hitting it. I feel it."
The couple have no place else to go. They live on about $300 a month in sustenance stamps and Social Security benefits. Also, similar to whatever remains of their family adjacent, they have been subsisting on rice and jars of Vienna hotdog, corned hamburger and sardines.
Torres inquires as to whether she could obtain his telephone to call a nephew in Connecticut. When she hears her nephew's voice on the telephone, she begins crying.
"God favor you," she lets him know. "You know I adore you in particular."
She's surpr
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