Samaritan's Purse specializes in meeting critical needs for victims of war, disaster, famine, and epidemics in the world's most troubled regions. We match resources to needs, personnel to situations, capabilities to opportunities. We often work through ministry partners already on the scene of a crisis.

The following story describes our ministry to provide emergency supplies in Jesus' Name.

The work is filthy, smelly, and tiring, but the young men do it without complaining. They even smile and joke a lot, as though there’s nothing they’d rather be doing.

They are volunteers from Jesus Our Hope International Assemblies church in Manila. Equipped with supplies from Samaritan's Purse, they are working in a neighborhood that was flooded with as much as 20 feet of water when Typhoon Ketsana hit the Philippines in late September.

The water left a mountain of mud behind when it receded. The mud clogged roads and neighborhoods, and made houses uninhabitable.

Samaritan's Purse is working with local churches to remove the muck from floors, dry out walls and ceilings, and allow people to move back into their homes.

The volunteers from Jesus Our Hope International Assemblies are forging a pathway to a home in a neighborhood in Marikina. The city, part of the Manila metropolitan area, received its worst flooding since 1937.

Two men attack a bank of calf-deep mud with shovels. They dump the muck into buckets, where it’s passed from hand to hand before being deposited in a growing mountain of brown muck.

When enough mud is removed, they’ll be able to begin working on the home.

“Hopefully we can make it a little livable,” said Danny Lucero, pastor of JOHIA church.

Rachel Lumabaz is glad they are here. The house belongs to the 17-year-old girl’s aunt.

“Thank you for coming to help us,” she said.

Rachel, who lives with her mother around the corner, tells the team what happened when the typhoon struck and the river began to rise.

“We thought about leaving, but before we could move the big flood came,” she said. “We thought they released water from the dam because it rose so fast.”

They moved to the second floor of their house, but the water kept rising.

“We broke open the window and swam over to the next home,” she said. “The house was completely submerged. You couldn’t see it. We couldn’t save anything. The following day we came back. There was no food, no clothes.”

When Samaritan's Purse began looking for volunteers to help people like the Lumabaz family, Lucero didn’t hesitate. This is why he left his job as an accountant to become a pastor.

“This is where the Lord called me,” he said. “I felt like I had to help. We can only make ourselves available, and the Lord will direct us.”

His church already had helped in the relief effort by packing and handing out emergency food parcels and hygiene kits supplied by Samaritan's Purse. Shoveling mud is just another way to show God’s love to the storm victims.

“I think it is the best witness, better than preaching the word,” he said. “If you look at Jesus as the model, He did acts of mercy first, and the word followed. People ask us why we are helping, and then we can tell them.”

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