Arrived back in New York yesterday. Severely jet lagged… I woke up at 330 PM today.

Internet connections during the second week of the trip were a lot harder to come by, so I’ll be assembling the remaining videos over the next week or two.

In the meantime, here’s an Engrish.com posting just waiting to happen that Dad and I found in the marketplace in Leyte…

(You may want to make sure you watch the video podcast first.)

Well, the first thing I found out when we hit the road this morning was that we were staying in Cebu Province/Island, but NOT going to stay in Cebu City. In fact, we went over the mountains clear to the other end of the island, to the village of Lamak (yes, I mispronounced it on the video), where a church in the neighboring town of Balamban is trying to plant a second church.

This was the second clinic Dr. Titus Bantiles, our lead doctor, had done in the area recently. By the time we arrived, there was already a large group gathered. We ended up seeing almost 300 medical patients, about 50 dental, and 50 vision patients. We also had a station set up to provide daycare for the children of many of the patients, who sometimes had a considerable wait.

Despite the numbers, it started off much like the other clinics. Our team did a little program in the beginning with music, preaching and various health lectures. The local church leaders participated. The doctors went to their stations, and it was time for “Riders up.”

I started doing the usual photos, filmed my usual opening piece for the video, and a couple of amusing spots on the vendors who started showing up to hawk food to the patients as well as having my dad doing some errands for the dental staff. I laid out the first few minutes of the video by the time we broke for lunch, at a church member’s home. The lumpiang was particularly delicious, and I had some time to talk with our host, who is one of the many overseas workers (oil refining) and was home while waiting for a visa for his next assignment, plus the pending birth of his child.

When we got back, however, something was different. Various people on the counseling team kept calling me over to shoot video of unusual cases, not all of which made it into the final podcast due to YouTube’s 10 minute maximum length.

Quickly, it turned into an emotional afternoon. Suddenly my own daughter’s little upset stomach I heard about this morning didn’t quite seem so serious, especially since Caroline had kept down her crackers at last report.

As I continued to add each piece to iMovie (I still haven’t gotten the hang of Final Cut Express yet), it became obvious that if we added the right follow-up pieces, we could have the defining piece of our team’s time together.

You could feel the team’s sense of wanting to be able to help, but not knowing if there were enough resources to help, and in the case of Brian’s patient, the added frustration of knowing that even heroic measures weren’t likely to help.

We’re seeing a number of needs come together at once—an amputee who needs a wheelchair so that she can continue to run her store now that her husband has left her. The woman who needs cataract surgery from two days ago, who doesn’t have the government health card that would keep her surgery to a manageable $200 USD. A child whose unusual vision problems will likely require hospitalization as well. The list goes on, and we haven’t even gotten to the particularly troubled areas yet.

But as I watched the local church members in action—it’s not an accident that Pastor Ben took responsibility for that mother and child’s goiter medicine and baby formulas—I realized that there’s a lot of support in place for them if we can get them a little more help.

***

When I decided to go on this trip, I knew I was going to mainly take still photos, since that’s my expertise, but I also wanted to do a series of videos in the style of Dane Sanders’ SimplePhotoMinute (http://www.SimplePhotoMinute.tv). A couple of weeks before I left, Dane, who’s also a Christian, aired a piece on the short term missions trip he was going on to India. That’s when I realized the type of impact that something like this project could have. And mainly I mean on me. If it impacts you or the supporters of Dad’s missions organization as well, that’s just an added benefit.

God’s put a lot of opportunities in my hands lately. It’s clear that he wants me to use them for more than just my own family, or even my own community.

***

Catching a boat to Leyte this evening for tomorrow’s clinic. Back soon.

Here’s the video for the second of our trips, the one to Bohol I described in the last post.

Tomorrow, we’re doing a clinic here in Cebu City, and then we’re in Leyte for the following day, coming back late at night.

Today was largely a day off, with some sightseeing, and travel back to Cebu. We also shipped the medicine for the final leg off to the team of doctors who will meet us for that clinic, which is on the main island of Luzon. Since we’ll be leaving the central islands, we’ll switch to a team from my Dad’s childhood church, the Cruzada Church of Christ in Manila. They’ll meet us for a clinic in an area devastated last December by a typhoon and the eruption of the Mayon volcano.

Here’s the first in a series of video podcasts I’ve been putting together for the medical missionary group that my Dad heads up:

***

Yesterday, we conducted a medical clinic here on the island of Bohol, a two hour ferry ride from Cebu. The local pastor whose church is affiliated with our visit met us in his jeepney, which is basically a mini truck that’s modified to carry about 10 passengers in the back. Jeepneys, incidentally, are everywhere. The vast majority of them are brightly decorated because they act like private buses that run regular routes. (It’s advertising to have them brightly/garishly decorated.)

Unfortunately, this jeepney broke down in the town center, about 2 miles away from where we were supposed to conduct the clinic. Our lead doctor quickly hired three tricycles—not the kid’s toy that you and I think of, but rather a light motorcycle with a lightweight sidecar frame that holds two people facing forward in a canopy, and either their baggage or two people in the back. For those of you scoring at home, that means we’ve got a total of 5 people, including the driver on board.

In a related story, the tricycles ended up having to stop about 100 yards away from our destination because the hill was too steep for them to carry that type of load. Still, after the hikes the last two days, this was nothing. We saw about 120 people—I’m told the clinic this weekend ended up serving 170 people—mainly children. Our optometrist saw one adult, however, who needed a level of care beyond what we could provide onsite. This woman had an advanced cataract problem that will require surgery. The missions organization will foot the bill for her transportation to Cebu and the cost of the surgery, which works out to about $200 USD, but in this rural region of the Philippines, that’s nearly three times what the average worker makes in a year, according to our lead doctor.

After our clinic, we stayed here in Bohol, getting rooms in a local boarding house, and eating across the street at one of the local grilling stands. And if you know how I feel about grilling, you know I was in heaven. Some of our younger team members spent the time asking me about the various sports Americans enjoy, and we had a great time.

Afterwards, as my Dad and I went back to our room, I got my first chance to watch Filipino TV. First off, let me say that the state of Filipino acting is far better in their commercials than it is in their telenovelas, which make the Mexican soap operas on Telemundo look like the Royal Shakespeare Company. Especially when you consider that they incessantly switch between Tagolog and English, which is not too far from normal around here anyway.

The thing is, the Philippines I’m seeing on the TV shows and especially in the commercials has absolutely nothing in common with what I’ve seen here in my four days, whether it be the rural areas, where you expect it, or the urban areas. And I’m realizing that I’d forgotten is that the major industry of the Philippines is what they call balikbayan—which basically means returning workers, but actually denotes Filipinos who take jobs (most often as nurses and also as doctors) in other countries like the US and Dubai, and send money back home. Their economic impact is so great that they keep the right to vote even after becoming citizens elsewhere.

I wonder if I’ll see the same discrepancies next week when I finally get to Manila.

Just got back last night from taking pictures for a free medical clinic in Asiotes, a village high in the mountains above Cebu City here in the central Philippine islands. The village is inaccessible by roads, and it takes a 90 minute hike to get there– the last 15 minutes is at a 45 degree angle, and on the way back down, it was a muddy, dangerous mess. My dad fell once, but luckily didn’t slide.

The villagers were wonderful, opening their homes to the 15 people on the team. It was a little difficult for me, as the one person on the team that didn’t speak Tagolog, since only 1/3 of the adults and none of the kids spoke English. That said, as soon as I started showing the photos (to be posted soon) to the kids and their parents, I had a smiling parade following me everywhere.

Asiotes has no running water or electricity, so we had to bring in our own supplies, including drinking water and toilet paper, in addition to the medicine. I did not envy the porters on the team.

The medical team served over 100 people from here and the surrounding villages– Asiotes is only about 30 people, including children. The optometrist was especially busy, as they’d never had an eye doctor come up before.

We conducted the Easter Sunday service the next day– it switched back and forth between English and Tagolog, so I could follow a quarter of it or so. My dad and the lead doctor both gave sermons.

We’re off to another island in a few minutes, so I don’t have time to upload pictures. I found I forgot the DV cable for my camcorder, so I’m now taking all my video on SD cards, using both the camcorder and my little Leica point and shoot. The Canon 5D was too bulky to bring to Asiotes, but it will go on today’s trip.