My name is Ramon Vargas and I'm the facilities manager for Henry Street.
I mean, the pandemia hit, and we had to
close buildings and keep certain buildings open and then change buildings from a
school based program into a food distribution center.
And the day to day, basically of my staff and to try to get them to come to work
every day was very challenging because the staff member families are dying.
My sister got sick with that.
My brother-in-law was in the hospital for close to a month.
And you hear there is 500 people dying a day.
And then you hear there's 700 people dying per day.
You have to leave your family and your family is under a lot of stress.
Like, my mother was in DR and she kept calling me and she's like, "Why are you
going to work today?" And myself, there were many days that really my stress level
was so high that I felt like not coming to work.
And not only me.
I mean, I have staff that work very closely with me.
And they were like, "I don't think it's right that we are out here.
The government is saying, stay home, stay home.
And I'm like, yeah, but we have a commitment with this community."
We got shelters that are 24 hour shelters.
We have buildings that we have to service. We got equipment.
We got to be out here.
Someone's got to do it.
They will call me and I will say, "Listen,
if you're feeling like that, stay home today.
If you need to stay home tomorrow, stay
home tomorrow." They think that you're going to get sick and bring these illness
to them, which did happen with my brother-in-law.
He kept working because he works in a supermarket.
He got sick, and he got his family sick.
I mean, thank god, he survived.
There's a lot of people died in my building.
There was seven people that died during that time.
There's still people that's dying.
I mean, it's really hard. You got to be strong and be out here.
I feel like we were like in a war zone and
people out there were so lost that I will find people just asking how could they
get food? How could they get access to, people that was calling me about their
rent, people were looking for food stamps or health insurance.
Or people would be calling me, asking me all these questions and all I could do was
direct them to call Henry Street at this number. Somebody is
going to reach out to you and help you out.
I don't think I would have been able to do it without the entire support of upper
management and porters and handyman and supervisors.
And then comes May, and June, and July, and things start to settle down.
At least in New York and you start breathing again.
You start feeling better.
And even my staff started not panicking so much.
And we still take all the precautions that we need to take.
And thank god, I think we did pretty good during the pandemia.