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.
Thank you Anna. Volunteering is fun and satisfying. Sometimes it's sobering and often morbid. But, I think that it is the combination of these things, that people come back to volunteer again and again. See you in the new year with my work gloves on!
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