Donations!

Donations! Donations! Someone noticed the Amazon list and wants to donate! They have already bought some things!

Hooray hooray hooray



If you too want to be awesome, check out the wishlist at
http://www.amazon.co.jp/registry/wishlist/3EX3ZQEYT41T

The supplies will go to Rikuzentakata and Kamaishi. Each item is listed as needing "100" but because these are all everyday use items, basically we just need as much as people can give.

Volunteer January 14/15, 19

I had a mission last Saturday, but I have it on good authority that last Saturday was spent breaking down a house--walls, ceiling, floors--probably so the house can be rebuilt without any rotting materials left behind.

Sunday I went. There were only three of us that day. They gave us those little orange wands to wave around and told us we were going to help cars park for an event. Entrusting this task in part to me sounded like a surefire way to cause the biggest car crash in the history of Kamaishi, but Futo-san was wise and put me in the entrance to the parking lot, where all I had to do was wave the cars on to someone else who knew better than I did. Wouldn't have been a hard job if it weren't for the fact that it was bitterly, horribly cold.
Two young trendy ladies in big horn-rimmed glasses shuffled into the event, and when they shuffled back out, they had a brief powwow between the two of them and shuffled up to me. It was to show me pictures of the event: a famous boxer, teaching little kids how to box. The girls reported that the boxer was being hugged by the children.
When the girls shuffled off, Futo-san asked me if I know those girls. No, I said. I waved goodbye to them as they pulled out of the parking lot. Futo-san asked me again, do you know them?
No, Futo-san. I am special so people show me pictures. :D

On Thursday, we leveled off someone's backyard. This meant getting rid of the excess gravel and such around so the ground was flat, plus getting rid of whatever rubble we found. It's surprising every time I do this how deep into the ground rubble gets, and how much there is of it. Ground that looks like it might have a bit of glass or plastic just on the surface ends up yielding big planks of wood, frying pans, mysterious metal things, who knows what, plus buckets of broken glass. All the broken glass a mosaic artist could ever want.
Spent the day hauling bags of gravel around. My body thought it was done for a while and is deeply upset that I am pulling this kind of junk with it again. Punishment: it hurts. I feel like I did 5000 situps and even little obscure muscles like the tool grippy muscles in my thumb are sore.

Volunteer Jan 7

This is the nice woman with the rice field we helped clear. HANDS had come to work at this site at least two times and it took a lot of work: chainsawing and throwing wood into the trucks our day, but it must have taken a lot of time to gather all that wood the other days.

She said that she still couldn't quite grasp the reality of the situation and even now felt like it might be a dream.

They had just spent money on repairing their new house and expected to live out the rest of their lives working on the rice field and living off retirement. Instead, the house was washed away and they're living in temporary housing.

Even though people say to "ganbaru" (do your best) no matter how much they worked to clean, it didn't make a dent in the rubble and they stopped even remembering what it felt like to be motivated or feel hopeful.

One of the other volunteers, Takami-san, later reported that she began crying for awhile while we were there and all he could do was cry along with her.

He did say she felt encouraged working alongside the other volunteers and seeing the rubble finally go away.

New: Donate to us!

Donate to HANDS!

While the world, and frankly, some parts of Japan, start to “move on” from the Tohoku disaster, coastal residents are increasingly being left out in the cold. 9 months into a recovery process that will take about 10 years, the people on the coast are nowhere near the point of being able to “move on” themselves. Meanwhile, many NPOs like HANDS that work directly in the disaster areas are struggling and going under due to lack of funding and interest.

Now, more than ever, HANDS needs your ongoing support.

NEW! Donate from outside Japan via ChipIn!

To make a donation from within Japan, please use the following information.

銀行名 (Bank name)：北日本銀行 (Kitanihon Ginkou, キタニホンギンコウ)

支店名 (Branch)：花巻支店 (Hanamaki Shiten ハナマキシテン)

口座種別 (Account type)：普通 (Normal)

口座番号 (Account number)：7034708

口座人名義 (Name of account) ：特定非営利活動法人ハンズ (HANDS!)

For information on how to do a bank transfer in Japan, please see this link:

http://www.survivingnjapan.com/2010/06/how-to-do-furikomi-bank-transfer.html

Why HANDS?

As of the end of December, HANDS had registered 1026 people and transported 4003 volunteers to and from the coast. We are still dispatching volunteers every day to distribute supplies, clean tsunami mud and rubble, help with landscaping, assist with events, and more. HANDS regularly helps coordinate events at volunteer centers to distribute food or other aid. The founder of HANDS has traveled the country as far as places like Tokyo, Nagoya and Shizuoka Prefecture and given lectures on the current state of the coast and how listeners can help.

HANDS is a smaller nonprofit, but there are advantages to being small. When people on the coast tell us they need something, we can react immediately while larger groups have to take time to deliberate. We’re flexible with volunteers as well—we take volunteers daily, sometimes on short notice, when many groups only dispatch volunteers once or twice a week, and we don’t ask people to attend an orientation.

Our group has relationships with the Rikuzentakata and Kamaishi volunteer centers. This means we can act as a contact to introduce small nonprofits, businesses or professionals who want to help the region. For example, a Hawaiian nonprofit called Kids Hurt Too reached out to HANDS a few months ago and we set up a meeting between Kids Hurt Too, HANDS, and the Kamaishi volunteer center. Now Kids Hurt Too will provide seminars in Kamaishi next June on grief and trauma and how residents can self-care to soothe their symptoms.

In another recent example, HANDS was contacted by a frozen foods company in Toyama prefecture and is now taking regular shipments of frozen food donations this winter to distribute to people living in temporary housing facilities that are too far away (30 minutes or more by car) from grocery stores.

HANDS is even in the business of throwing the occasional party. With the cooperation and support of the foreign community in Iwate, HANDS and Kamaishi Volunteer Center threw a Christmas party for children in Kaminakajima temporary housing unit. Later, HANDS received donations for wine and amazake, a traditional New Year’s alcohol made out of rice, and distributed the drinks to temporary housing residents for New Year’s.

The needs of the coast will change through the 10 years recovery is estimated to take, but HANDS is flexible and dedicated enough to adapt to those changes. And it might not just be Tohoku that benefits; Jun, the head of HANDS, said he wants to use our organization to help other regions hit by disasters in the future, within Japan and even overseas.

If you can, please consider supporting us this year so we can continue to help the coast.

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.