I’ve never been accused of being a writer, or even an eloquent speaker. I don’t have a lot of experience writing anything that many people see or sharing my opinions with people in a large group. What I do have is concern for my fellow man. When I see someone in need I have a desire to help them. Sometimes I can, but there are times when I am unable to assist for many different reasons. Community Through Colors helps me scratch the itch I get when there is devastation somewhere and I can’t help. I know that they will do what they can to assist the people involved to the best of their ability.

When Fiona went through Puerto Rico, the entire island lost electricity. There was little access to drinking water because of this lack of power. Hospitals were running out of diesel for their generators due to the severely weakened infrastructure, lack of electricity for fuel pumps, and difficulty in getting fuel delivered.

Think about this if you will. More than 40 percent of the residents of Puerto Rico are living below the poverty line. On an island of approximately 3.3 million people, there are roughly 1.3 million that live below poverty. If you have ever seen hurricane recovery efforts you know what is involved. Days go by, sometimes weeks, with no power. Residents are forced to seek other methods to supply electricity. Think about that. Almost half the population lives below the poverty line, there is no electricity to power gasoline pumps so even on the off chance they could afford an internal combustion generator they can’t fuel it, and within days their food is going to be useless because their refrigerator doesn’t have power. So now you have a community, a proud community, working hard to restore what they have lost while simultaneously being malnourished due to lack of food and dehydrated due to lack of drinkable water. How do you combat that?

This is where we, and many other nonprofits like us, come in. Prior to disasters we help install solar power on critical infrastructure such as water pumps. We provide food from our farm throughout the year, but even more important than that we do it following natural disasters when food is already scarce. We know what it is like to have little and have to stretch it to make sure everyone has some. We want to do everything we can to make sure that we feed as many people as we can that are unable to do so for themselves. Whether it is delivering food to the elderly, feeding those that are working so hard on repairing our infrastructure, or simply offering a bottle of water to someone who keeps telling themselves that they will get to a break (that never happens) after they get one more house back on the electrical grid.

What we can provide may be considered small when you compare it to larger nonprofit groups. I can assure you that none of the people I mentioned earlier in this post would agree with that assessment though. One person can make a difference. One bottle of water. One meal. That is all it takes. You already made a difference in that person’s life. Without help from our generous donors this would not be possible. This post wasn’t written to ask for donations. It was written to let you know, in a little more detail, what we do and the differences we make. If you decide to make a donation though, know this, no amount is too small. Even a $1 donation can make a difference to someone. If you can’t donate, that is fine too. Thank you for reading this and getting this far. Either way, if you could share this so people can see a little of what we do, how we do it, and why, it would be appreciated tremendously.