Happy New Year

It's not even New Year's yet. It's only New Year's on the other side of the international dateline, but somehow everyone akemeshite omedetou-ing on Facebook makes me want to write a New Year's greeting early.

First of all, it's been a gift meeting every person who participated in HANDS this last year. I remember each one of you and think about you often. Thank you for your patience with the limits of our humble organization. Thank you for telling your friends about us. Thank you for caring enough to come.
Our leaders and our regular volunteers were very happy to meet all of you. They're so happy, they've started talking at me in English trying to practice so they can speak to you all. Please come back so they can stop speaking to me in English and practice on you instead. :D My Japanese is suffering.

I've had a nice two week vacation in another country--my country, Oregon!--and spent most of it completely slacking off volunteer-wise. Now it's almost time to return to my other country--Iwate, Japan!--back to my freezing apartment and my city, which is probably buried in snow, for volunteer: version 2012.

The first thing I need to do, other than email that one guy back, is to make a new entry here about what people can to help the coast, now, and update it regularly. The best way to for people to lose motivation and give up on a cause is for them to believe that there's nothing to be done anymore. There is absolutely something everyone can still do. Part of that something is yes, giving money, and another part is volunteering (volunteers! we are still taking them!) but there are other somethings. I will tell you about those soon.

I noticed during my two weeks in Oregon that it's like a tsunami-less, earthquake-less alternate universe.　Maybe some of you reading this went home from Iwate or somewhere else in Tohoku and experienced the same thing. If that's the case, I know it's discouraging, but make sure you don't give up.

The trick to finding people who are interested in helping is to move your focus away from personal contacts. Make it more general. Do not try to make your aunt care about what happened. You may love your aunt, you may care about your aunt, and you may wish your aunt cared more about the disaster and wanted to help. (To my aunt: this is a hypothetical aunt, I know you care.) However, your aunt is only one person. It's like approaching individual people and trying to make them all badminton enthusiasts. Some people will be receptive to it, but others won't, and nothing makes your aunt more likely to be a badminton enthusiast just because she's close to you.

Tell your university. Tell your old study abroad program. Write a letter to the editor in your hometown. Write a guest opinion in the newspaper. Ask your old workplace to put something up on their blog. Tell them what is happening now and then make sure to tell them specifics on what they can do about it. Then, let people come to you and follow up with them. Repeat. And you never know, your aunt might just want to get involved after all.

So the second thing I plan to do is to write to newspapers in Oregon, my hometown's and the nearest big city, and do just that. There are things that people at home can do and it's a waste of resources as long as people with the potential to act aren't being reached.

Third and final thing: there is a lot of content about HANDS and about recovery that I haven't been putting up on this blog. Part of the reason is because it's Japanese content and I don't have the time to translate it all, and part of it is it just doesn't occur to me to make that content available in English. Anyway, I know you have just as much right as I have to information, so I'll try to do better at passing on more details about what we do, and more news about recovery in general.

This is my last full day in Oregon. Off to pack and exercise and spend time with my family, plus stuff myself full with food. Have a wonderful New Year's Day or New Year's Eve, depending on your location.

Anna

HANDS vacation

Hi from the States, everybody:

HANDS is taking time off from December 27th to January 5th for winter break. If you have time off during that period and are looking for a place to volunteer, please try the following:

• It's Not Just Mud in Ishinomaki http://itsnotjustmud.com/
• Ask the Facebook group Foreign Volunteers Japan, on the wall, to see if anyone can get you any leads.
• If you are a Japanese reader or can find someone to help you, also try searching for a volunteer center that's open during that time at http://tasukeaijapan.jp/?page_id=11515 Click the city you might want to volunteer in, then click the link to that volunteer center's home page. They should have info about whether they're open during the holiday and whether they let individual volunteers register.
  

Christmas party!

Well, it finally came: the Christmas party. I'd been preparing for weeks: pencils, crayons, stickers, wrapped gifts, phone calls, and the horrible, gnash your teeth mishaps that happen when you're trying to get a big group of people in one place doing one thing with a bunch of supplies in tow.

I randomly asked about the key to the room we were going to hold the event in, only to get an answer back that it was basically impossible to get. There was a 30 minute window of time during which the key was available, and it was in a radioactive box in a fortress surrounded by a moat filled with man-eating electric eels.
Well, maybe that last bit is an exaggeration, but seriously, 30 minute window of time!
Then we discovered that the planned time to leave from Kitakami with HANDS left us with approximately 15 minutes to set up, which was impossible. My apartment was filled with Christmas miscellaneous and I had driven myself crazy with wrapping the perfect little Christmas presents for Santa to hand out.

Then, the morning of the big event I spent the prep time alternately forgetting to give people their insurance cards and name tags, looking confused, and being filled with an unreasonable, murderous rage towards people who kept putting little stuff on my craft table.
The event was from 10 to 12, and at 10:15, only two sweet little old ladies were sitting making trees and stuff at the craft table. Most of the volunteers were wistfully looking out the window and commenting on where all the children would be, and questioning what exactly had been my advertising method. (I had made a poster about the event a week and a half in advance, and left the distribution of the poster up to the volunteer center and HANDS.)
I finally cracked and called leader Jun at 10:15 to yell something along the lines of "There are TWO little old ladies here!" He arrived and hung up shortly after, but I was about ready to demand he kidnap a vanful of kindergarteners and bring them to the party by 10:30.

Eventually, some kids started coming, and then more kids and adults, but I lost track of what was going on inside because I was too busy bullying the man who had volunteered to be Santa ("Stand out in the cold and hold a sign!" "Pass out these presents now!") and trying to lure children passing by into the event.

In fact, I don't have much memory of the event beyond what I've already written here. There was a setup, during which time I panicked, then I did something I can't remember for two hours, and a takedown, during which time I panicked less, then a picture, then returning nametags and key and such to volunteer center, then the drive home and the wait for the HANDS "end of the year" party, which was going to be held that night.

When the Christmas party ended I didn't even believe that any children had actually attended. By my reckoning, we had only lured in about five, so I wandered around looking shellshocked wondering why everyone looked so satisfied, asking people, "Did kids come? Did kids really come?" Volunteer Ken said about 30 children came, which I couldn't believe.

When I got home, though, I saw actual pictures of the children that had been inside during the event. A little boy, holding some kind of board game he'd won, with an ENORMOUS smile on his face. Four little old ladies occupying the craft table, contentedly making origami Santas and such for two hours. The brother and sister who I'd found in the nearby playground and invited to the party, grinning and playing pin the body parts on the snowman. A three year old playing a game with his mom sitting next to him.

Frankly, though the people I got to hang out with were wonderful, the event itself was probably one of the least pleasant experiences I'd had in a while. Even before I saw those pictures, though, right after, I found myself thinking "Maybe we should do this in a school or a kindergarten next year."

"Next year"?

It's been a crazy year. 9 months ago, on March 10th, I didn't understand what a tsunami was or what it could do. I had little active interest in nonprofits, viewing them as an abstract "good" that didn't really have a lot to do with me. I had never seen rubble. I didn't know how or care how to use a shovel. There were some things I knew I would never do: I would never recruit. I would never network. I would never be a leader. I would never take less than two days off a week. I would never devote more than 40 hours a week to work.

I know what we've experienced is nothing compared to the experiences of people who survive the tsunami, but I think all of us in HANDS have been and continue to be enormously hurt by, and at the same time reap countless blessings from, that big stupid horrible wall of water that killed so many people and destroyed so many towns 9 months ago. We spent all of our lives, all 22 or 26 or 35 or 52 years, thinking that we were this certain kind of person with certain kinds of priorities, only to suddenly discover that we have been changed, and that the change is probably permanent.

We have gained a close-knit group of comrades and friends of all ages, Japanese and foreign, men and women, but we sacrifice time with our other friends and family to see them. We are tender enough to clean the mud from the floor of another person's toilet and to carefully carry their photographs to a safe place to be cleaned. We are callous enough to throw children's shoes away without thinking. We have regularly worked in places where someone has been killed, and went home cheerful, with an ice cream stop on the way. We do what we are told is the right thing to do, while worrying that it really isn't. We grope for new information because we have to see the future, now that we're almost inseparable from this group and this movement, we have to know where it's heading because it's going to take us along with it.

Sometimes I don't recognize myself and I don't recognize the priorities in my life. Sometimes I feel like a big hand has reached out of the sky and changed me into another person out of necessity. Maybe it happened the first day, cleaning that field of rubble, feeling the kind of power and satisfaction you can only get out of physically showing another person you care about them, out of making a place that has been dirtied and made unnatural healthy again. Maybe it was what one of the leaders said to me that day, that the reason volunteers were going every day was to help the coast recover as soon as possible. Maybe it happened gradually instead: hundreds of bags of mud tied up and carried to piles, combined with the hazy memory of the Oregon beach at age 5: the smell of salt, sand in the toes, fish for dinner, kites, hooded sweatshirts.

I saw Rikuzentakata for the first time four days before the tsunami. I remember a big beautiful pine forest with high schoolers running relays on the beach. I remember a river with boys from a row team coming through. I remember my friend and I running into an older birdwatcher, a friend of his. His glasses and his friendly expression and the video of a goose he showed me on his camcorder. He was never found. The yachts were floating peacefully in the harbor. Any time I want to, I can remember that place. The high schoolers are still running relays, the boys are still rowing in the river, my friend's friend is still on his bicycle waiting to show us his videos of birds. Every time I remember it the sky seems bluer and the day is sunnier and all of the high schoolers running their relays look so, so happy.


This is the place I remember.

On Saturday, one HANDS team made flower beds for an old folks home in Kamaishi, and the other put on a Christmas party for Kaminakashima temporary housing unit, also in Kamaishi. We are taking volunteers every day in December except today, because of the party we had last night, and we will still be taking volunteers every day in January.

The ground is white with the snow that got dumped on Kitakami last night and people are gingerly shoveling their driveways. The swans are happy and my heater is ineffective and it looks like winter is here. I'm getting on the shinkansen to Tokyo in about four hours and haven't packed yet, how's that for procrastination? Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Distributing goods and mochi destruction

Last Sunday, we helped out with an event to distribute goods at a temporary housing unit:

clothing, laundry detergent, soap, diapers, adult diapers, toilet paper, heat pads, laundry softener, even calendars. We also handed out tonjiru (a kind of pork soup?) and made mochi.

Distributing goods is difficult. Everyone needs these items, and it`s not always easy to get them, so they`re polite, but everyone has to take what they can quickly. There were a lot of rapid fire questions about what a certain item was or how many they were allowed to take, which is a little difficult to answer quickly in another language. I got the hang of it, kind of, though.

(If you are looking at this blog and considering volunteering without Japanese language skill: don`t worry. We make adjustments for people who can`t speak Japanese.)

The toilet paper disappeared very quickly. So did the diapers and the detergent. In fact, most everything went except some of the clothing, a few of the heat patches, the calendars, and some junky-looking necklaces.

I assumed that the coast would be warmer than inland and had underdressed a bit. I mean, it is warmer on the coast, but the temporary housing unit was in a windy area, and the windchill made it feel colder. One of the other regular volunteers took a coat from the donated clothing and tried to give it to me.

I said, "No, no, someone will use it." But then he pointed out that it was stained, and nobody would be able to use it anyway. I thought about this for a second, and then accepted the coat.

Thank you, person who donated their dirty coat.

I think it`s great to donate items to people who need them, but for the record: don`t donate a dirty coat! It`s like somebody thinks donating is better than throwing the coat away, and besides, the poor people on the coast will take anything they can get. From that logic, it`s OK to take a bite out of a hamburger and feed it to a homeless person. "Well, it wouldn`t be OK for me, but it is OK for you, because you are a poor person."

I think perhaps that reasoning is suspect!

Like, if you wouldn`t wear the dirty coat, don`t expect someone else less fortunate than you to wear the dirty coat because you don`t think they have any other options. Donate a clean one, or better yet: buy a new coat!

Give the dirty coat to the volunteer instead. :D We like dirty coats.

So, got a new dirty coat which shall become my special winter volunteer coat. Then, we made mochi. Of course they eventually decided that the random foreign volunteer needed to help swing the large mochi hammer thingy to make mochi. I obliged, reluctantly. After a little bit, I thought, this isn`t so bad, I`m really starting to get the hang of this, looks like this mochi will get made without any mishaps, but then...

!!!!

OH NO

You have got to be KIDDING!

I had DESTROYED the mochi hammer thing! There was to be NO MORE MOCHI because I had destroyed the mochi hammer thing. I think the gentleman in this picture is actually the head of Kamaishi volunteer center, holding one piece of what USED to be a mochi hammer thing, probably thinking "remind me why we take foreign volunteers again!"

Well, actually, there was a spare mochi hammer thing (?? Because everybody`s got a mochi hammer lying around in their truck bed? Where did it come from?) and fortunately, I did not destroy it.

Tomorrow`s a Christmas party for some kids in Kamaishi, nervous but we`ve got some really great volunteers for the event. Then back to the States for two weeks. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours.

Saturday in Rikuzentakata

Last Saturday we went to Rikuzentakata, because the group accompanying us was pretty big, and the Kamaishi Volunteer Center said they didn`t have a job large enough to fit all of us.

We let Kitakami station at a leisurely 7:40! 7:40! This means I, since I live about 5 minutes away from the station, only had to get up at around 6:40 or so! (I take a long time to shower and put on clothes and drink coffee and stuff first thing in the morning). It was heavenly. Usually I would get up at around 5:30 or 5:45.

We changed the time to try and make the drive over safer. Recently the weather has been getting cold, as it`s apt to do in inland Iwate, and the road can get frozen. Hopefully, departing an extra hour later gives the sun time to make the drive safer. (For what it`s worth, if the roads are too dangerous, HANDS cancels volunteer dispatch for that day.)

So halfway through the drive to Rikuzentakata, it starts raining. I think to myself, "Sure, it`s raining, but maybe it`ll stop soon. Because: I want it to stop."

Unfortunately, rain does not follow that sort of logic. If anything, it actually started to rain harder.

We pull into the parking lot and walk over to the volunteer center and it`s still raining. We get assigned to a job, and it`s still raining. We drive to the worksite. It`s still raining.

I read in Japanese somewhere that much of the big rubble in Rikuzentakata has been cleaned up and now it`s just "smaller" rubble, but judging from what we were working with on Saturday, small rubble isn`t really that small. We were asked to move piles of rubble around what appeared to be a field to a series of sorted piles that were next to the road. This was probably so dump trucks or such could easily pick them up later.

I say it appeared to be a field because in the part of Rikuzentakata that was hit by the tsunami, it`s really hard to tell what a place used to be. Part of Rikuzentakata was basically washed away. You can tell where buildings were because you can see the foundation, but otherwise it`s hard to believe there was a city there.

Myself and volunteer Will and blue coat studies legends of Toono-san (I still can`t remember this guy`s name) were assigned to a strip of land that hadn`t been cleared of rubble yet. We were to gather the rubble into piles, then carry the rubble via wheelbarrow to the piles next to the road.

There was a lot of wood and some plastic, and pieces of styrofoam that were blowing around in the wind. Shoes. A tire, a sheet of metal that had probably been a door to something, and a large tank of something that had been somehow buried almost completely in the ground. Unfortunately we didn`t have the time to dig that last one up, because it definitely wasn`t meant to be there.

The road from our strip of land to the piles of rubble, between our wheelbarrows and the rain--which wasn`t letting up so much as getting heavier--quickly turned into a big mud trap. Like a fool, I hadn`t watched the weather report so had come to volunteer wearing a pair of jeans, which got soaking wet in about 5 minutes.

Unfortunately, because of the weather, volunteer ended before lunch.

It`s worthwhile going, even when volunteering ends early or gets canceled, because otherwise the work we did wouldn`t have happened, but it`s kind of disappointing not to be able to put in a full day.

I`m not even sure a full day would have been possible even if we had decided to work through the rain, though, because if that road had gotten churned up much further, it wouldn`t have been much of a road anymore.

Rikuzentakata, the disaster area, is strange and depressing. The rain doesn`t help much. It`s mostly flat, with just a couple of buildings still standing. The only tree left in the great big pine forest that used to line the Rikuzentakata coastline is visible from a long distance away. The news recently said that the pine tree, which had been a kind of symbol for resilience or something, is definitely eventually going to die. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I wish they could put up a statue of a tree there when the real one dies, until they get some other pine trees planted. No one wants to see the one symbol of resilience for miles and miles wither up and fall over.

There are still animals. Birds, especially. Osprey, seagulls, ducks in the rivers, egrets. It can`t be a good place for a bird to live, anymore, though. The water doesn`t look right. You see some ducks in the water, you start to want to go out and coax them all into cages and bring them to a nice wetland somewhere.

Rikuzentakata is not completely destroyed. There`s an undamaged area, and people still live there. I always forget that, for some reason, remembering the part that got washed away.

In the volunteer center, where they give us free coffee and cocoa, I saw letters from schoolchildren in Rikuzentakata thanking volunteers. "Thank you for cleaning up the rubble so it`s safe to walk around." How terrible, to be a kid and live in a place where you have to worry if it`s safe to walk around.

By May 2011, I had already decided never to set foot on the Iwate coast again. I reasoned I had been through enough just being inland, with the earthquake and the nuclear scare. At first, I avoided the tsunami footage and news articles because I felt if I saw anything else, between that and the aftershocks, I was just going to crack psychologically. Gradually, once I started to feel better, I reasoned that I still needed a break. Then I concluded that I had been through enough, like some disaster quota had been reached, and that was why I shouldn’t go to the coast.

Really, at that point, I was just avoiding going to the coast for the same reason people avoid looking at homeless people. I didn’t want to come into contact with people less fortunate than I was, because that would be uncomfortable. I might be required to feel something, and with that feeling might come a sense of responsibility, or commitment, and then I might have to adjust my schedule to include volunteering, and for some reason I didn’t want that to happen. Now I can’t seem to remember why. What exactly was it I thought I was doing with Saturdays that was so important?

Going to Kamaishi in May 2011 was a coincidence. I met a friend who had gone volunteering with HANDS, two times in a span of two weeks. I promised him the first time I would give it a go, and felt like I really would for a bit, but after a week I was almost about to forget about it. Then I met him again, a second time, and my conscience, which has really been mostly dormant for the past ten years of my life, sensed I was in a weakened state and took the opportunity to gnaw full force at my ankle until I signed up.

Then I saw what had happened to the coast, and the rest kind of happened on its own. But before, I was ready to forget about it. So I think I understand when people, Japanese or anyone, say that they’re busy to come, or it’s too painful to see what’s happened, or maybe next time. I think I understand when I see less volunteers at the centers and notice less inquiries about volunteering, I think I’ll understand when I go to the United States for Christmas and see that really, no one covers Japan anymore. Not as much.

It’s natural, I guess, it’s supposed to be natural, that more and more people are going to see this as a Wikipedia article or a news story that has already passed, A combination of time and distance and “it’s not my country” or “it’s not my prefecture” or “it’s not my area of the prefecture” is going to smooth everything over. But the horrible thing is, it’s going to smooth everything over for everyone but the people on the coast.

The situation on the coast has improved, but it hasn’t changed as much as the way people view it, as a historical event. Something that has already been cleaned up, something that will resolve on its own. But I can tell you that last weekend we cleaned a floorful of rotting clothes and bedding still wet from the tsunami, and tomorrow we will go to Rikuzentakata where there’s an enormous gaping hole in the middle of the city because everything got washed away. Last week nothing had been solved, this week nothing has been solved, and I expected next week nothing will be solved yet either. Imagine my surprise when English language news articles tell me that the cleanup phase has ended. No, not here, not as of last Saturday. And even when it does end, that’s absolutely not the end of this at all.

I’ve seen it too often lately to be a coincidence. Many different Japanese NPOs, who have talked with coastal residents in much closer detail than I have, all coming up with the same message. Residents see less volunteers coming in, less NPOs, and they express the fear that they have already been forgotten.