Gerry Brown has seen large-scale death and destruction before, at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, and during the 2004 Asian tsunami.
Now the corpulent, bearded pastor from the U-Turn for Christ evangelical church based in Perris, California, wades through waist-deep mud on central Leyte island. His Filipino followers have set up a counseling center for rescue workers trying to find survivors of the landslide that buried the village of Guinsaugon.
Keeping hope alive is difficult.
"With every day gone by, chances of finding people alive are slim," said Brown, who is affiliated with the foundation of evangelist Billy Graham.
He said he arrived at the site of the terrorist attacks in New York City soon after they happened, and was active in counseling Thai survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami.
He sticks out among the US Marines, Taiwanese and Malaysian teams and Filipino volunteers from all over the archipelago. Dressed in shorts, flip-flops or muddy rubber boots and a striped shirt, Brown carries a badge reading "Sheriff's Deputy Riverside." He's the sheriff's chaplain in Riverside, California.
"This is just horrific," he said. "I was on Samar Island for a pastors' conference when this happened. I just jumped on a truck and drove down here."
Brown said his small Filipino church team has offered counseling to local rescuers, officials and volunteers, who are losing hope fast.
"Morale is down," he said. "But we'll stay here as long as necessary."
Every morning, Lance Corporal Christian Carney from Long Island, New York, plays Amazing Grace on his bagpipes.
Some Marines applaud, then grab shovels and communication gear, line up and board the back of dump trucks for a short ride, then walk up in the mud to dig or clear a path for payloaders approaching the devastation.
Language is a problem for the US Marines, but they have specialists and interpreters. A few are Filipino-Americans. Yesterday, Captain Mark Paolicelli, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, looked for a Spanish-speaking Marine to talk to the Spanish team about getting the dogs to the site of a school -- the focus of the rescue effort. He found one within minutes.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS