First let me apologize for last night’s blog. The days are very long and last night in particular it was very late when I started writing and literally fell asleep while typing 4 times – what I did not know was that in this situation, my hands keep typing, sometimes a sentence or more and the content can be really bizarre. Fortunately my proofing caught the really big errors but I was not at my best…

After I finished writing last night, we ran into the Sister Elisa who has been our benefactor and host at the Divine Word Hospital. It was late at night and although she runs ancillary services here, she was on our floor to finish setting up a room for an incoming guest. We were glad to see her because for all our time here we had been trying to get her some medicine, especially anesthesia that she needs, her typical vendors cannot currently provide it and since hers is a private Hospital, she cannot go to the department of Health.

Sadly, we have been unsuccessful at getting her what she needs because it is tricky to acquire these meds in a country whose basic systems are still very much in place. It is a sign of the health of the country that it is not possible to just end run the system and get what you want. Our impromptu meeting was to inform her that we had failed and to discuss what else we could do to help her as she had helped us. Her only idea is for us to repair a roof that runs the length of the large hospital and that is beyond our capabilities so we will need to be creative.

This morning, with only 3 hours of sleep under my belt, we started our day meeting with Ricky Yeo and his counterparts from Tram Trade, an Engineering, Architecture and Contracting company based near Manila. When we left the school on Thursday night, we were frustrated at the limited resources they had to assist with engineering decisions. They have strong carpenters on the ground but no one to do the real design that is necessary in a number of the buildings – especially the ones that are only a year old – were put in by the government and were literally destroyed in the storm.

We truly stumbled upon Ricky and his friends because we were seated at adjoining tables at Dinner – they just looked like Engineers, we asked them if they were and after a really short conversation they agreed to join us in a trip to the school this next morning – just as a favor and to help out.

At 7am this morning we all met for coffee. We at HELP had a few errands to do in Tacloban before heading out and our new friends were incredibly gracious in helping us and giving us the time to complete them. They joined us at the lumber yard where we paid for our roofing materials, waited for me to get an incoming wire of donor funds and then drove us to the site to allow Oscar to take delivery of the building materials – all of it took much longer than anticipated and by the time Barry and I stuffed into their small car to leave the van behind for Oscar, it was already almost 11:30am.

One of our delays was related to a money order we collected – the bank returned the money in small bills so we are carrying around a true sack of $.

Ricky took his time reviewing each structure and gave us notes, suggestions and drawings where necessary to describe his suggestions for the renovations and he and his friends left with just enough time for them to get to the airport for their flights home. After Ricky left, we had a quick lunch, the truck with the sheets arrived and began delivery and we left in search of lumber to rebuild trusses and purlins lost in the storm.

When we were done we needed to return to Tacloban as ABS news had called and asked for an interview so at 3pm we were back at our hospital home doing the interview which we hope is now running on Filipino TV.