From Newsday.com

On his first official trip to China as president of the 1.3-million-member Lions Clubs International, Albert F. Brandel of Melville found thousands of earthquake survivors still living in tents as the worst of the rainy season was giving way to mudslides.

The Lions, who first responded with tents and blankets when a massive earthquake struck central China in May, are now aiding the Chinese government's efforts to get people resettled by mid-August. "We want to see them out of the tents," Brandel said.

Brandel, 59, a retired Nassau County police detective, was elected president of the global service organization in Bangkok, Thailand, in late June, succeeding Mahendra Amarasuriya of Sri Lanka. He made the visit to the earthquake-ravaged country a priority in an official year of traveling to worldwide Lions Club projects, which will include audiences with Pope Benedict XVI in Rome and Queen Elizabeth in England.

Lions Clubs International Foundation, "the only international volunteer service organization in China," Brandel said, worked with a grassroots network of local Lions to deliver relief supplies. In his July tour of Sichuan province, he saw villages that were as much as 90 percent destroyed. Working just outside a devastated village, the Lions are helping build 60 homes, a school and a health care facility.

At a factory where 500 people were killed, "they were still digging for bodies," he said. He also visited a 3,000-tent city of earthquake refugees.

Brandel said the Lions' relationship with China dates back to 1998, when the Lions invested $30 million in sight-related programs, including $2.5 million for the removal of cataracts, an eye abnormality that particularly afflicted people in Tibet.

In 2001, after terrorists struck the World Trade Center, Brandel was at Ground Zero coordinating Lions' support efforts that included providing shelter and warehouse supplies for police and firefighters.

He retired from the Nassau police force in 2005 after a 35-year career, much of it devoted to "helping kids in trouble." He was assigned to the Nassau Juvenile Aid Bureau in 1982 and to the Missing Persons Bureau for the last three years.

As a young police officer in 1975, he joined his local West Hempstead Lions Club and rose from club president to district governor to international board of directors.

Now in Texas at a Lions camp for disabled children, he plans to visit Scandinavian projects later this month with his wife, Maureen, a pediatric anesthesiologist at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola. Part of his job as president, he said, is to thank Lions volunteers who labor in the organization's campaigns against blindness, drug abuse, diabetes and childhood diseases.

Contributions to the Lions' earthquake relief efforts can be made through the foundation Web site, LCIF.org.