Hello! To all my friends and family: I'm still alive and still here in Tacloban volunteering with All Hands Volunteers. It's been a very fulfilling three months so far, packed with carpentry, trench digging, sledging, and an overall integration within the Waray culture of the Eastern Visayas. Why? Because we are all brothers and sisters in this world.

So far, I have been part of the completion of the Tagpuro transitional home site, where 86 coco lumber homes were erected to house families that lost everything, including their loved ones, to the towering storm surge of Yolanda in the coastal areas of Tacloban. I also witnessed the construction of two permanent core houses built for the Pedrosa and Garcia families of Barangay 83-C, an area completely washed out by Yolanda's 20 ft tall storm surge. 

On November 10th, 6 other volunteers and I will be taking part in a 300km cycling trip that will follow the landfall path of Yolanda - from Guiuan, Eastern Samar to Ormoc, Leyte. Each day, we will be stopping off in the communities along the route and opening up dialogue with the locals. The goal of this journey is to spread general awareness of the lives of the survivors one year later. While Tacloban received the bulk of international media attention post-storm, the entirety of the Eastern Visayas was greatly affected. We will be documenting the entire trip, and posting daily to social media outlets. In my mind, this event will bring the current situation of these Warayan people back into the international consciousness - their resilience, their spirit of community, and their further needs.

This event will also be linked to All Hands Project Leyte's 1.1 Million Peso campaign. It hopes to raise just 1 peso for every home affected by the typhoon. With these funds, we will continue the construction of permanent core housing in Tacloban so that families no longer have to live in tents or makeshift homes.