Everything is Much Better Now

We are still taking volunteers every day in November except November 6th.

It`s the last week in October and HANDS is still dispatching volunteers daily: today we dispatched to Kamaishi. The group includes a college student from the JSP exchange program at Tokyo International University, accompanied by our fair site leader Futo-san and a number of other volunteers. Looks like maybe 6 people in total?
I, of course, am at work, though would rather be with them.

It`s been a long time since I started working with HANDS, about five months now. My first time was during the last week in May, when Kamaishi was covered in piles of rubble, and there were these crumpled-up cars scattered everywhere, and boats and cars balanced precariously on the tops of buildings. Slowly, gradually, the town has improved. Compared to “before” pictures, everything looks better. People who haven`t been here for a while sometimes comment on how clean it is compared to before.

But clean isn`t a relative term. Clean is a word for a regular town, where you can dig in a flower bed and you won`t find handfuls of glass and twisted plastic things and rotting books. Clean is a word for a place without rubble--rubble that has now been sitting, untouched, for about seven months--in the first floor of so many buildings. Clean is a word for a place that doesn`t need masks and gloves, for buildings that don`t need to be hosed down with water and disinfected so the smell doesn`t start again.

Even now, volunteers who have never seen the area before sometimes comment that it looks like a war zone. But once these places don`t look as impressive, as catastrophic as they did earlier on, will more and more people forget about Tohoku because it looks better now? Will they forget what they might have heard on the news, that better is supposed to take ten years?
When will people start believing that living conditions on the coast are “good enough?” But we don`t have the right to assume anything is “good enough” for other people until it fits our own expectations for living. Kamaishi is not “better” or “clean” or “good enough” until it meets the conditions of being a regular city again.

All Hands makes all of its long term volunteers take a break for at least three days a month for mental health reasons. Peace Boat usually limits participation time to one week. Interesting to think about the residents themselves, who have been in a disaster area--and not just any disaster area, their own home--for seven months solid. It`s too bad those people can`t get a break from what they have lived with and what they are still living with every day for mental health reasons.

The last weekend I came to Kamaishi I saw a line of elementary school students, maybe waiting for a bus, and three or four of the boys were laughing and slapping another boy in the face. I was in a van, watching this happen, and the van happened to stop right next to the group of boys. The other boys were slapping this one boy in the face, over and over again, while the boy yelled at them, while right next to them stood an adult man who was probably a teacher. The man wasn`t doing anything. Maybe he was tired of breaking up fights. The boys were still slapping him, over and over, when we finally drove away.

What do you think happens to children who are going through an experience like this? Do you think those kids feel better that their dangerous, scary war zone town with broken glass in the flowerbeds is less of a scary, dangerous war zone town than a few months ago? Maybe they`ll feel better when you remind them there are no more cars on tops of buildings anymore. That the enormous ship that has been left with its tip stuck in the side of a road has finally been removed, and it only took seven months.

Who would have the nerve to tell these people that this month, that next month or the month after that is good enough? I certainly don`t, and I`m sure HANDS doesn`t.
Not until they tell us they don`t need us anymore. Not until Kamaishi is a place I would want to live in. Not until the beach is a place to take a vacation.