Your Efforts Are Making a Difference in the Philippines

Thank you so much for the efforts you made to help us outfit Charity Vision’s advance team. Those who were already on the ground in the Philippines are setting up their base camp and have connected with a local church so they have a safe “home base” for their operation. We delivered the supplies we promised to CharityVision last night, and the remaining members of the advance team (those who weren’t already in the Philippines) will fly out with those supplies on Saturday. Additional contributions that come in today will help to provide even more supplies. Here is an excerpt from an email sent by one of the group members who is already in the Philippines. We hope it gives you an idea of what they'll be doing: "Here's the news so far! My goal is to have a base camp established and staffed by the time you [the rest of the advance team] arrive in Ormoc. A local church is organizing volunteers to handle facilities, outreach, internal security (along with police), organizing and controlling crowds, [and] sourcing victims to treat. Their women’s group will be in charge of water, cooking, cleaning and assisting with medical triage. The goal for those of you who are medical will be to hit the ground running. Those who are logistics or search and rescue will be making sorties into areas that have not had relief to clear roads and bring in those in the worst shape. Given the security concerns, my goal is to bring a massive show of relief to the city… We'll create a distribution model for health care and food. In order to receive either they [will] have to have been screened by the local volunteers and given a pass to get into the facility." You may also be interested to know that the supplies we send with CharityVision will be left behind in the Philippines when their team leaves, so those tools and supplies can continue to benefit the local communities. Thank you for your efforts, donations, and purchases—not only are they making this advance team’s medical, logistics, and search efforts possible, but they are facilitating the efforts of the larger group who will follow them to the Philippines shortly! We also want to give a special shout out to these vendors, who partnered with us to provide many additional supplies to the CharityVision team: