Pre-debrief

Rooftop view from hotel, overlooking downtown Tacloban. 

I'm 12 hours from finishing my time here in the Philippines and thought it worth sharing a bit of my experience.

There is a strange dichotomy here on the ground between a world devastated and a world recovering. I have watched streets of trash and debris clear away to small markets and shops, watched electricity being slowly extended day by day down the street, watched thousands of small actions accumulate into a little town on the Pacific. The place I am leaving is not the same as the place in which I arrived.

The people here are ridiculously nice, nicer than just about anywhere I've ever been. PHP is the 'South' of South Asia and I've been trying to teach them to say "y'all".

There is a current of faith within this community; much less blaming God here than would be expected. God is God, even in these days. PTL. 

Samaritan's Purse has overwhelmed me with the entirety of its work, in food distribution, medical clinics, building and distributing shelter DIY kits, etc. The WASH team has worked in 11 towns providing drinking water, and are digging wells for two of the temporary camps people will live in starting in two weeks. 

Santa with the kids. The local tradition combines Trick-or-Treat and Christmas, so that you give out candy or small change to the children.

Photo with my company vest on. Of course I didn't put the vest on just for the photo. I resent the insinuation. 

3,000 buckets distributed with Sawyer filters for individual families. Water treatment / chlorination systems installed in ten villages (permanent installs) and two temporary bunkhouses. Providing 'tapstands' allows people to collect potable (drinkable) water and return home. 

 

We contracted the formerly beautiful but now destroyed Oriental Hotel as a warehouse for supplies, including 10,000 shelter kits (wood, tarps, roofing), thousands of tonnes of food, blankets, buckets (see above), pumps/chlorine/pipe... just about everything you could imagine. I had no idea what I didn't know about disaster response. Samaritan's Purse has proven itself very qualified. 

Looking at a recently built septic tank in the government-built temporary bunkhouses. Not totally sure how the sewage is going to drain with the water table five feet deep - the problems of a extremely flat coastal area.

We miraculously found Richie the local well digger, who takes with an 8' piece of bamboo, splays out the end, and starts throwing it into the ground. After the hole is around 5-6' deep, he changes to this tripod with a pulley and hollow steel pipe. Throws it into the ground, scooping a bit of sand at a time, until he finishes, with a 30' deep well, lined with 4" PVC. We are completing our 4th of ~8 wells now. 

When a pump stopped working, after the community had built a cage around it, I was too large to fit through the bars. That's where our local engineering student hires come in handy.  John was in there around 90 minutes, taking the pump apart and back together with a 6" adjustable wrench. 

My kids on the drive home after a long day in the sun. Two very sharp local engineering students, without whom there is no way we could have accomplished  as much as we have. Every sentence, request, text, question, utterance from my mouth received a "Yes, sir" or "No, sir" response. It was humbling and humorous.  

I don't totally know what role I played in all of this. I have been helpful, I am sure, and maybe I will better understand why God asked me to do this some day in the future. But I am grateful to be here, and grateful to have whatever it is that I have and the means of giving it away. I inhabit the 'Knowledge Economy", best able to serve the folks by sharing that knowledge and helping them rest secure in a simple forms of security: water. 

I hope that I have honored God with my words and deeds while here, and pray for the handful that will stay on for months to come. I return home after a short jaunt, and they have a long haul ahead.