Reaching Out To The Philippines

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.

Please enable Javascript to watch this video

LACKAWANNA COUNTY---In Lackawanna County, donations have been coming in, bags of clothes, cans of food, bottles of water and medicine to help those devastated by a typhoon in the Philippines, more than 84-hundred miles away.

"Anything that can help them, help the people out in the Philippines, they're in a real hard way right now," said Cherise Pokorny of Dallas.

Mike Fajardo is a member of the Scranton Filipino community.

He spent his childhood there and family members still live there.

Thankfully, he said they survived the disaster, but many others did not.

"It was my first time to see such devastation and it's hard, it's hard to look at the pictures, the images," said Fajardo.

Annie Grebek also has family in the Philippines, including her mother, brother and sister.

They, too, are OK, but seeing the devastation on the news pushed Annie and her family to help.

"I'm speechless, I saw everything, my heart is breaking."

The group will be shipping the donations to the Philippines for free through a courier out of the Philadelphia area.

From there, they said the Red Cross will hand them out directly to the people affected by the typhoon.