Language of Love...

As many as 3,000 villagers are believed to have lost their homes.

Earth, loosened by days of continuous rain, 
slid down a mountain and engulfed a town in Southern Leyte on Friday.

On February 17, 2006 Joe and I were living in Manila, Philippines when the devastating mudslides hit the southern town of Leyte.  

When Joe saw the first pictures of the mudslide - the largest picture on the front page of the paper was a man holding a dead child in his arms - Joe was speechless.  He was literally shocked speechless! He had never seen a picture of a dead child and was not prepared for those frightful images when he opened the folded newspaper hanging on our hotel room door.

I took a few minutes to read the startling headlines above and then tried to soften their blow in translation for Joe.  I explained to him what the pictures were describing - crying mothers and fathers holding their injured children; bleeding hands of men moving boulders and rocks with no machinery...the graphic images were too numerous to look at for more than just seconds at a time.

I tried to pull the paper from Joe's grasp, but he wanted an explanation...he wanted to look.  He wanted to understand what was happening to those people.  So we spent most of that morning together, talking, crying, praying that survivors would be found. 

After I gave him explanations that seemed to calm his emotions, I re-directed him to his art notebook and tried to finish preparing my class curriculum for the day.

A few minutes later he came to me dragging a large black trash bag. It was filled with items of clothing from his 3 suitcases.  Inside the bag were 14 shirts, 3 pair of pants, a belt and 2 pair of shoes. While I had been busy writing at the desk, he had actually gone through his suitcases and taken out the clothes he wanted to give to the families who had lost everything in the mudslides.

As I rummaged through the sack to see what he had put in there I noticed he had only selected his NEW shirts, NEW pants, NEW belt and NEW shoes. Not one item was chosen from his old or raggy old play clothes that were brought from home - he still had those tacky things in his suitcase.

Without asking permission or even waiting for me to assist him, he had formulated his own plan to select the very best of everything he had, put it in a satchel of some kind and give the items to the families he saw in the photographs.

He only gave me a few minutes to look at his bagged up clothes before he gathered the sack up in his arms and headed out of our hotel room straight to the elevator.  He was a man on a mission.

Of course, I followed him into the elevator and down to the front desk of the hotel - he with his newspaper in one hand and trash bag in the other.

Once he had the attention of the clerk at the front desk, and in his very slow, very labored speech, he pointed to the picture and said, "Me give (pause), my clothes."

By the time he had finished his slow, deliberate, four word explanation, several hotel employees had gathered around.  He said it again, with greater intensity and overwhelming emotion, "Me give (pause), my clothes." The look on their faces revealed exactly what they were feeling.

One bellboy, who had always been especially kind to Joe, gently peeled the sack from his tightened grip and assured him that the International Red Cross would deliver the clothes to the children in Leyte.

Almost one year after this experience, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir dedicated its January 28, 2007 'Music and the Spoken Word' radio broadcast to Joe in honor of his immediate outpouring of love to the mudslide victims.  

Of Joe it was said, "...in that moment, Joe spoke a language more perfect and eloquent than any other in the world.  He spoke a language that is native to every race and culture.  It binds hearts, overcomes barriers, and transforms lives.  The language Joe spoke best of all was the language of love."