Two more staff members will be traveling to Port-au-Prince Wednesday to help with our relief efforts being coordinated from our office in Haiti. They will meet up with Project Officer Mike Henry, who has been working diligently from the devastated country since the earthquake hit Tuesday.

The victims of Haiti's massive 7.2-magnitude earthquake are still desperate for help.

“We will be doing whatever we can to help our partners. We plan to visit some of them as long as we have access to fuel,” said Claudio Merisio, our Latin America projects officer who just returned from Guatemala and postponed his trip to visit partners in Peru in order to go to Haiti.

Mike Wilson, our International Projects Director who several years of experience living and working in Haiti, is flying back early from visiting our partners in the Philippines to travel with Claudio. Both plan to stay in Haiti at least a week.

Since the airport in Port-au-Prince is still closed to commercial traffic, Mike Wilson and Claudio plan to fly into the Dominican Republic and take a bus across the boarder and on to Port-au-Prince. From there they will meet up with Mike Henry at our Haiti office.

Please pray for Mike Wilson and Claudio as they make their way to Haiti, and continue to pray for Mike Henry as he works from our office in Port-au-Prince! We covet your prayers and support.

We reached out to several of our ministry partners in the Philippines and Vietnam over the last few days to see if they were OK after the devastating floods caused by Tropical Storm Ketsana. So far, we’ve only heard back from one of them — please continue to pray.

At least 400,000 people from Manila and the surrounding provinces have been displaced by Tropical Storm Ketsana’s flood waters.

On Saturday (Sept. 26), Tropical Storm Ketsana barreled into the Philippines, dropping the heaviest rain the country has seen in decades. Massive floods quickly engulfed the capital city of Manila and the surrounding areas, claiming the lives of at least 284 people and leaving nearly 400,000 displaced. (Click here to see photos.) Local officials say the death toll from flooding in the Philippines continues to rise as the strengthened storm, now Typhoon Ketsana, moved on to slam into central Vietnam today (Tuesday), killing at least 23 Vietnamese.

This morning we received an email from Sr. Irene, who runs the Marie Louis Trichet Learning Center, a school for handicapped children we support in Manila. Though she admits that the floods have been devastating, she offers words of hope for the school and her country’s recovery:

Sr. Irene runs the Marie Louis Trichet Learning Center, a school for handicapped children we support in Manila.

My dear brothers and sisters,
Thanks for your concern. This typhoon is really a tragedy. All schools are closed for the week. People still have water in their house waist deep. Many of our parents have nothing left. What they have salvaged they are trying to dry in the sun, but another typhoon is expected in the next few days. But you know the people here they are very resilient and say, “At least our kids are alive.”

The casualties are up to 150 dead but many are still missing, mostly children who could not fight the current when the rivers were overflowing and the dams opened. In Cainta Rizal, all six kids from the same family died in a landslide. The people from U.S. Embassy are really doing a lot and want to help our kids also with rice and especially bottled water. You can just try to imagine what the place looks like with the garbage everywhere, the rats and what not. Lucky the government is responding quite well, and Malacanan was turned into an emergency center.

Despite the devastation, we know God is in control and we will recover.

Take care,
Sr. Irene

Continue to pray for the people of the Philippines and Vietnam, and say special prayers for Sr. Irene and our other ministry partners working so diligently to help the storm-devastated people. Click here to learn more about what we are doing to help Sr. Irene and the poor her ministry serves.