It's 2017, a hurricane passed damn near a month ago, and the power is still out.

Welcome to In The Think, a podcast about politics, race and culture from a POC perspective.

I'm Juho-I-Kal-Lober-Ela hosting solo this week, while my co-hosts Marianne Hosa is on a reporting trip.

So four weeks after Hurricane Maria made

landfall in Puerto Rico, we're going to do a deep dive into the ongoing crisis

and this week we're going to do things a bit differently. We're going to hear from

two journalists who recently just came back from reporting trips on the island.

And then we want to get their thoughts about what this means for the future of Puerto Rico.

First up, Francis Robles, reporter for the New York Times.

Hey, Frenchy!

Hi, how are you?

So Frenchy, we're four weeks out from the first day

that Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico,

and it's still a mess.

So give me a bird's eye view of the situation on the island right now.

One thing that was really interesting about this hurricane. I've covered a lot of natural disasters and usually you see like one place that got walloped right where every house is a pile of

toothpicks. You didn't see that here. You saw a lot of the cement houses were fine. So if you're driving around Puerto Rico in general, you might look around and be like, oh, this isn't so bad. But what you don't realize, okay, every single street has X number of power lines down poles all over the ground all over

Puerto Rico like honestly it's stagh staggering to see like you look around

and you mean like the electrical poles are yeah the electrical staggering to see like you look around and

Oh you mean like the electrical poles are on the floor they're on the floor like

it's you think about it and you're like oh my god they have to bring these up one by

one you know this is gonna forever. The other thing that was

...