KISSIMMEE, Fla. _ For a few hours each day, the doors in this cobbled-together community are flung wide open.
The younger kids wander in and out of their neighbors' rooms and play with donated toys. The mothers and grandmothers oversee the chaos from balconies that overlook the parking lot, waving as their neighbors leave for work or come back from the graveyard shift.
The bigger kids ask the women for their blessing when they walk into the room, observing tradition usually meant for families even though these are titis _ aunties _ in name only.
For dozens of families who left their lives behind in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, this motel is their home address: the Super 8 on West Vine Street, at the end of a stretch of gift and food shops, next to a 24-hour coin laundromat and a cellphone repair store.
The motel has in a matter of months become home to the tastes, scents and scenes of a displaced Puerto Rican neighborhood.
But the families, inextricably linked by devastation from which the island is still struggling to recover, won't be here much longer.
On Saturday, FEMA housing aid for 610 Boricua families will run out, forcing most to move on from their informal motel communities, where they have been united by a sense of loss and have put down unexpected roots.
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