Where the families in the hotels will ultimately end up remains to be seen.
In lobby of the Hartford hotel, one woman said that her daughter had gotten a nursing job and that her family was looking for an apartment. Among others, there was an air of weariness, as they anguished over what might come next. Job interviews had been unsuccessful or language barriers made it difficult to find work. Some were simply aimless as weeks went by with little to do. When Ms. Febres needed to go to the store, her family made the three-mile walk to a Walmart just because they wanted to burn energy.
Many were still reeling from the trauma that has festered since the storm.
Ms. Arroyo was flown to New York City on Nov. 15 and spent two weeks with an aunt before checking into a hotel in Corona, Queens. She suffers from a litany of medical conditions, including diabetes and depression. She needs a wheelchair and is blind in her left eye, which is covered by a patch of white gauze taped to her reading glasses.
After the storm and before her evacuation to New York, she was largely confined to her bed in her home in Ponce, cared for by her father’s widow. Stuck in sweltering heat, she worried that wounds on her body would become infected. She was so fearful she even wrote a will and instructions to cremate her remains on the back of a photograph of her father and mother, which she clutched in her hands as she slept.
“I don’t know how I survived,” she said.
Yanitza Cruz, who is nearly eight months pregnant, was told when she checked into the hotel in Queens in December that she could stay until Feb. 14. She has become increasingly worried as the deadline approaches; her calls to FEMA yielded few answers. When she tried to check the status of her case online, the website said it had been “withdrawn.”
“The clock is ticking,” she said. “Time is against us.”
She traveled to Queens with her husband, Joel García, and 5-year-old daughter, Janesty, from the mountain town of Orocovis, southwest of San Juan. They had been drawn by the promise that New York appeared to offer, fueling hopes of getting an apartment and, for Mr. García, becoming a licensed barber in the city he saw as a “barbershop mecca.” It seemed different from home, where they struggled even before the hurricane.
“We didn’t even have a car in Puerto Rico,” Mr. García said. “We would walk with our bags under the sun. Now we’re in a place where for $2.75 I can travel to Brooklyn. I see this as an opportunity. But the thing is, we haven’t found stability yet. I’m just looking for stability.”
It is difficult to tell when that stability might ever come, but last week they did receive a measure of relief. FEMA called to let them know they could stay in the hotel another month.
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