Anyway, let`s talk about last weekend`s activities! It was a pretty weird combination of activities: on Saturday, we planted flowers in pots and flower beds to decorate Miyako Station. On Sunday, we went to Kamaishi and cleaned up an enormous pile of rubble behind a building.
Saturday was nice and relaxing. At first, if you happen to not be a flower person (like me), you might worry about harming the flower during the process of putting it in the pot, but after a while you learn to relax a bit and enjoy shoveling the dirt into pots and pretending you have a color sense. I was a little jealous of the Man Team, who got to do more physical work like shovel dirt into flower beds and such.
Sometimes we get explicitly separated into the Man Team and the Woman Team for volunteer activities, which is not my favorite, but you have to make a judgment call. If you are in another country, volunteering or doing anything really, you have to work with what people want or expect you to do. Otherwise, if you decide that you`re going to do it the special non-sexist American way and everybody else should too, you`ll end up hindering the work you want done in the first place by wasting everyone`s time arguing about something no one`s going to change their mind about.
This does not mean it is not ridiculous, however. Especially when someone in charge says "All the women will move these little rocks over here," but when you start moving all the little rocks using the wheelbarrow it becomes a really hardcore heavy weight bearing activity. But then they can`t really take it back, and amaaaazingly it turns out we can handle it anyway!!
Anyway, but the women what with our estrogen and natural color sense did hopefully a good job with the flower pots. And Miyako Station, I have to say, looks great.
I suppose I shouldn`t complain about lack of physical work, however, because the next day we went to Kamaishi and cleaned this.
It was an enormous pile of rubble, a house had essentially been washed into the alley behind the building next to it. Keep in mind that this is November and the disaster happened last March. That`s an eight month old pile of rubble.
There is nothing like the piles of rubble that I`ve seen in Kamaishi. They`re not like regular piles of trash. They have their own smell and their own weird set of colors. Twisted plastic, rotting books, the weird tsunami mud, splintered planks of wood, telephones, televisions, cans of beer. And yes, teddy bears. Children`s clothing. Wallets for teenage girls. You learn not to look at these things too closely. You learn not to think about the little shoes. It takes a newer volunteer commenting, "I hate finding these," for you to think about it again.
On Sunday, a big group of volunteers wallowed through this pit of dirt and rotting tatami mats and ex-furniture and twisted clothing and pulled everything out, and eventually we finished with this:
The other side of the building, but you get the idea. After a day`s work, with many vans full of volunteers coming in as reinforcement, we got the area back to ground level, though you can see the ground still isn`t clean.
Tomorrow we have another public holiday and more than 10 foreigners coming to volunteer through HANDS! That`s a HANDS record, for your information, and it`s all thanks to one of our regular participants offering to set up an event. I`m looking forward to seeing the faces of surprised Japanese volunteers at the center when an entire mob of foreigners shows up. Should be fun. :D
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