A HUMANITARIAN MISSION OVER GUINTARCAN ISLAND

DEATH VALLEY MAGAZINE, through their Death Valley Expeditionary Corps, came to Cebu recently to engage in a humanitarian mission to ease the plight of the communities caused by Tropical Cyclone Haiyan. Haiyan, also known as Typhoon Yolanda, was the strongest storm that the world had ever experienced in its entire modern climatic history with wind strength of 215 KPH and above. It struck the Philippines on November 8, 2013 leaving a wide swath of destruction and death. The islands of Samar and Leyte bore the full brunt of the storm as well as Northern Cebu and on the rest of the Visayas.

DVM is an online magazine about professional adventurers and interesting people while the DV Expeditionary Corps is its humanitarian arm. It gets its crew from the very places where they go to execute their relief missions and expeditions just like they did at Guintarcan Island recently. Their Philippine contacts were from the Camp Red Bushcraft and Survival Guild, a Cebu-based club of outdoorsmen who are passionate about primitive-living skills and knives. They were Jing de Egurrola, Glenn Pestaño, Ernie Salomon, Dominic Sepe, Faith Gomez and Justine Ianne Abella with Jhurds Neo as base support.

James Price, founder of DVM, arrived at the Mactan Cebu International Airport in the early morning of November 22, 2013 and brought with him relief goods donated by the people and servicemen of the United States of America. Mr. Price decided to augment his cargo with locally-sourced goods like powdered milk, canned sardines and beans, biscuits, laundry soaps, candies, disposable lighters and bottled water.

On the morning of November 23, the DV Expeditionary Corps proceeded to Medellin in a convoy of two vehicles provided by Gerald Ortiz and the Don Bosco Technical High School Batch ‘94. A small motorboat ferried the crew and cargo over the Bantayan Channel into the small village of Langub in Guintarcan where the relief goods were distributed. A good number of affected households came to avail of the said items that Mr. Price personally distributed.

The DV Expeditionary Corps transferred to a seaside community of Dapdap and used the partly-damaged house of Tita Rosos as its base camp from where it reached out to the needs of the residents like the field treatment of the wound caused by burns on a youth that Mr. Price dressed and ocular assessment of the area. The crew returned to mainland Cebu on the following day, November 24, after that successful aid mission. Below are the collage of photos that document this activity of two days:

First printed over istorya.net on December 17, 2013

Document done in LibreOffice 3.3 Writer