Fortnight in the Philippines

So it turns out my blog post about the Philippines was long enough to be a book. It is a bit of a short book but a book nonetheless.

It was such a unique experience that writing about it was both very easy and a bit of a challenge. There is so much to say about what happened, what we did, the ongoing situation. I could have made an epic that rivaled War and Peace. In length. Not so much in artistic value. But who has time to write such a thing. And, frankly, who would ever read it.

It is currently available in a variety of digital formats. Print versions will likely take a while. I am still trying to get Letters to Friends in paperback. That one is flying off the shelves like a zeppelin. This one might have to wait.

Kindle
A bunch of different formats

Barnes and Noble, Sony, Apple are all coming soon.

Tagalong Writing

I started writing about my time in the Philippines. I’ve yet to finish. I cannot say what will happen with it whenever I am finally finished. It is already too long to be a blog post. But I doubt it will ever be long enough to be a book.

I suppose I could add more to it to make a book length but that would take some time and I have no real desire to do such a thing. My current plan is to write whatever comes out and decide what to do with it later.

Stay tuned. Maybe there will be an epic multipart post in the coming weeks.


Update: Nevermind.

What I Did On Thanksgiving

I have returned from the Philippines. It was an amazing experience and I am still processing the tsunami of information floating around in my head.

The IDF sent 234 people, including 150 doctors, nurses, medical technicians. We set up a field hospital, found a lot of survivors, found even more dead people, built schools, created entire water systems. The doctors treated 2686 patients, including 848 children, and delivered 36 babies. Two of the children were brought back to Tel Aviv for cleft palate surgery that could be better performed at an actual hospital.

My team spent a great deal of time flying over islands and being endlessly impressed with how powerful a typhoon can be. The mayor of one of the smaller cities said it looked like a war zone. Some areas looked like pictures of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. There would be a lone tree trying to stay up surrounded by debris as far as the eye could see. One of the big differences was that most of the dead in Hiroshima were incinerated. In the Philippines there were dead bodies everywhere.

On an ironic note, the Japanese delegation in the Philippines landed next to a monument dedicated to the people of the Philippines who died in the Japanese invasion.

I will have much more to say about this later. By this I mean the typhoon and our relief mission, not the Japanese.