Franklin Graham visits Venezuela earthquake relief hospital treating thousands

On June 24, two earthquakes struck Venezuela in rapid succession—a 7.2 magnitude tremor followed 37 seconds later by a 7.5—and the ground did not stop shaking. When it did, more than 5,000 people were dead and 16,000 more were injured. La Guaira, a coastal city, absorbed some of the worst of it. Entire apartment buildings folded like paper. One man was trapped under rubble for two days, six floors down, with no food, no water, no light, before rescuers spent six hours extracting him from the dark.

Franklin Graham, who leads both Samaritan's Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, traveled to Venezuela with his daughter Cissie Graham Lynch to see the relief operation firsthand. What they found was a field hospital in La Guaira that had already treated more than 2,500 patients. The hospital had two operating rooms, a pharmacy, a laboratory. Doctors were performing orthopedic surgeries. Nurses were treating infections that had gone untreated since the earthquakes hit. Nearly every person who came through the doors had lost someone—a family member, a close friend, sometimes both.

One survivor, the man who had been trapped for two days, sat with a nurse who had made him paper shoes because he had nothing else to wear. "I lose everything, I don't have anything," he said. "A nurse here made me paper shoes, I feel so happy for that." Another man had injured his leg while pulling a child—not his own child, someone else's child—from a collapsed 14-story building. "It was terrifying," he said. "I thought a plane had crashed." The scale of destruction had unmade the ordinary categories of experience.

Cissie Graham Lynch encountered a local pastor who had lost several members of his congregation in the earthquakes. The pastor was still showing up to serve his community. "I am here to serve and win souls for Christ," he told her. Lynch said later: "I saw both the immense suffering and the incredible strength of the Venezuelan people." Franklin Graham spoke of bringing "the light of Jesus Christ into these places of pain." The medical teams were providing not just surgery and antibiotics but also prayer—doctors kneeling beside patients, praying with them as part of the care.

The scale of the response had been swift and substantial. More than 170 relief workers from Samaritan's Purse were deployed across the hardest-hit areas: La Guaira, Playa Grande, Caraballeda. Six Boeing 767 aircraft had delivered 295 tons of supplies—the first non-military flights to land in Venezuela after the earthquakes. More than 10,200 families had received emergency kits: tents, tarps, solar lights, blankets, hygiene supplies, cooking equipment, Spanish Bibles. Four emergency clinic modules had been installed in local healthcare facilities, with a fifth opening soon, each stocked with medical supplies and generators to restore basic healthcare to devastated communities. Two desalination units had produced more than 154,000 liters of clean water.

But the numbers, large as they were, could not quite contain what was happening. A man with paper shoes made by a nurse. A pastor still showing up to his congregation after losing members of it. A doctor on his knees in prayer beside a patient who had never experienced that kind of attention before. "The doctors pray with me," the survivor said. "That's beautiful when they get on their knees and pray with me. I love that. Nobody do that for me." In the aftermath of catastrophe, when everything tangible had been taken, the presence of another person—their attention, their prayer, their willingness to kneel—had become its own form of relief.