James Schofield was about to leave for Cuba to help with recovery efforts after Hurricane Irma when he heard that another hurricane – Maria – was headed toward the Caribbean.

“I went to Cuba, came home, and started making plans to get to Puerto Rico to take a look at what Maria left,” he said. “And Maria was tragic.”

He’s taken a half-dozen trips to Puerto Rico since the storm.

For his relief efforts, the 52-year-old Manitou Springs native received a 2018 Hometown Hero award for community service from the Red Cross of Southeastern Colorado. He was nominated after he rallied a group of Pikes Peak Community College students to volunteer in Puerto Rico through his nonprofit, Mazatlán Missions.

On Schofield’s first trip to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, cities were pitch-black at night, and the trees were “blown bare,” he said.

“At the time, I thought, ‘How long is it going to take for this to grow back?’ Now, being there five months after the hurricane, a lot of it’s coming back – it’s a tropical environment, so things grow well,” he said. “Five weeks after the hurricane, there were still power lines down everywhere, so driving on residential streets, driving on city streets, you were driving over downed power lines all the time. Now, thankfully, there was no electricity in them, but they were down everywhere.”

The Category 4 storm, which hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, damaged two-thirds of the island’s power distribution system and caused the longest blackout in U.S. history. It also killed dozens of people and caused up to an estimated $94 billion in damage.

Some 15 percent of power customers remained in the dark as of late February, and more than 700 families were still living in hotels across the island. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans fled to the U.S. mainland after the storm.

“If you ask me, and I think if you ask some people a lot more knowledgeable than I, the rebuild of Puerto Rico is going to be 10 years, 15 years, in terms of it getting back to what it was like – or a little bit better,” Schofield said.

Schofield’s nonprofit is named after Mazatlán, the city on the west coast of Mexico where his family lived for a decade. They returned to Colorado in 2007, and now he helps arrange weeklong service trips to Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico and Cuba.

“The majority of our trips will be to Puerto Rico … in the next two years, because the need is so great and the interest is very strong,” Schofield said. “We were already serving in Puerto Rico prior to the hurricane, so really what’s changed is now, we’re doing relief effort, more rebuild effort.”

Mazatlán Missions will take more volunteers on trips this year than any year before, and about 80 percent are headed to Puerto Rico, Schofield said. This summer, groups will be in Puerto Rico for at least 10 weeks in a row, he said.

“In Puerto Rico … we work with a couple cities, their mayors and their city workers, who go out and find the homes of people that are in great need, and then our teams come in and we break up into small work teams and we go to sites throughout the week,” Schofield said.

Volunteers aren’t required to have any particular skills – only a willingness to work and have “an attitude that’s willing to get outside of one’s comfort zone and engage people for the purpose of mutual encouragement,” Schofield said. They do, however, have to pay – or raise funding – to participate.

“Obviously if they speak Spanish, that’s just an added benefit and blessing, but we have a lot of people they’ve just got hands and feet and want to work,” Schofield said. Groups range from about 10 to 145 people.

And it’s a family effort: Schofield’s wife and three adult children lead trips. “Thankfully, my kids have come alongside me and participate in what they grew up living,” he said.

One of Schofield’s daughters, Amy, works full time for Mazatlán Missions. Serving in Latin America “is just so integrated into our family – it’s part of who we are,” she said. Having grown up in Mexico, returning to the region feels like going home, she said.

For more information about Mazatlán Missions, visit impactadventure.org.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Contact Ellie Mulder: 636-0198

Twitter: @lemarie