Being thankful for what you’ve got
You can skip the report and go straight to the photos here.
From some time ago I had planned to take a week off in early April. It’s purpose was for a final hard training period for Nagano marathon which was due to be held on April 17th.
On March 11th that all changed.
A couple of weeks after the earthquake Nagano marathon was cancelled. Although my training had gone reasonably well, given all that has happened in Japan I wasn’t particularly surprised or upset. But I still had a weeks holidays coming up with no real plans.
Then I heard about an NGO called PeaceBoat who were starting relief activities in Ishinomaki city in Miyagi prefecture (about 360km north of Tokyo). My friend Richard had gone up with the advance group to make a video for them. Some people in my running club had also mentioned it was a good organisation. I decided to go.
I gathered a weeks worth of supplies. The logistics of this is a good exercise to have to consider. We had to make our own way to the bus departure point (Takadanobabba, Tokyo) so you needed to be able to carry everything yourself, including a minimum of 4 liters of water. I’m sure there must be a scientific approach to this for adventurers who go the the poles or climb mountains, in my case the bulk of what I brought comprised of seven sachets of curry and seven packs of cooked rice.
PeaceBoat has had its base on the grounds of Ishinomaki University since about 10 days after the earthquake. They’ve been sending increasing numbers of volunteers up for one week periods at a time since then. The week I went up (15-23 April) there were four busses – a total of about 120 people. We were in teams of eight each. I was in Team 32 – one of the two international teams.
It consisted of; Ai (Japanese) the bilingual team leader, a teacher, translator, tv researcher … , Carla (Canadian) a IT consultant; Mike (American) a teacher and artist, German (Chilean) studying for a phd in future power generation at Tokyo University; Allyn (Canadian) an automotive engineer; Ester (Belgian) a former teacher about to start studying wildlife photography.
A couple of days after arriving there we had a new addition to our team, Kenneth (Norwegian) a military man. It was his first trip to Japan. He is trying to create a disaster relief NGO and decided to come to help out in any way, test some equipment and learn as much as he could from the experience. All he had was his backpack, a little bike and a piece of paper that he would show to people he met with something like “Hello my name is Kenneth, is there anything I can do to help you?” written in Japanese. At times I can get a bit frustrated at not having the necessary language skills in Japan. This was a good reminder of how we can still function with very limited language skills.
We were also joined for a day by a 22 year old piano teacher from London called Matt. He was traveling through Japan and wanted to help if he could.
We got settled in on Saturday morning and after lunch we went to the city center to start work. Everyone was raring to go and we were reminded that we were there to help the locals and not for our own satisfaction. PeaceBoat basically put their resources at the disposal of the local city office and were allocated tasks from them. The main priority was to try and clean up shops and businesses in the area that wasn’t completely destroyed. This was about 3-4k from the sea.
You’ve all seen the footage. The scale of the destruction was staggering.
Over the course of a days work I would often switch from thinking “this is a bit useless” to “we’re making real progress” back and forth all the time. At our daily morning briefings we were often told encouraging little stories the organisers had heard from the locals. They also told us that beyond the actual cleaning we were doing that the activity gave the people some hope that some progress was being made.
One day we were cleaning near the home of a blind man. He said something like “I can’t see that it’s clean, but I can smell it and hear it” This is one of the more memorable moments from a week that had many.
Over the week we cleaned drains, gardens, a fugu restaurant, a nori (seaweed) store and a kimono shop. We met some great people over the course of our work. Their attitude and good humour given their situation was remarkable. One man was cleaning some luggage outside his shop. In a very matter-of-fact He told me it belonged to two of his sisters who were about to leave to visit their other sister in Hawaii when the tsunami struck. They both died.
My team worked together really well. There wasn’t one raised voice the whole week. It was interesting to see all the different skills being put to use as people gravitated to the tasks that suited them the best. It was very refreshing to have to use your brain to work out how the solve the various challenges we faced. Allyn was particularly good at this.
I was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, but enjoyed using the floor squeegee. The weeks highlight was on the last day when we had the use of a power hose. That was great fun.
Our normal day was to meet at 07:30, go into Ishinomaki around 08:30. Work till 12:00 for lunch, then from 13:00 to 16:00 before cleaning our tools and returning back to the campsite for about 18:00. We would prepare our dinner and most nights were in bed by 20:00.
I loved the camping. It was freezing cold with a vicious wind but once inside the tent and the sleeping bag it was fine. I kept on finding all this amazing gear in the tent that my friend Phil had lent me use for the week.
On the last day we had a small hanami (Cherry blossom) party thrown by the locals. We had lovely BBQ chicken and other treats. We were joined by Atsushi-san from the fugu restaurant. He asked if we had any alcohol at the campsite. When we said no, he asked if we would like something. Without much hesitation I said “YES”, and he dashed off. He came back a few minutes later with a large bottle of sake discreetly wrapped and bagged. We opened it in the tent that evening and all the aches of the weeks work melted away.
Since both before going to Ishinomaki and coming back I’ve had a lot of people say “fair play”, “well done” etc. The fact is I was very excited to be going there. I knew it would be something new, different and interesting. I was looking forward to doing a bit of grunt work for a few days. As a graphic designer the most vigorous part of my day is normally a 10m walk to the printer. Being able to do something that has an immediate, tangible effect is very rewarding.
Unfortunately these natural disasters are part of the reality of life for certain regions of the world, especially Japan. For thousands of years they have, and will continue to devastate parts of this country. If there one overriding thought I have from this week, that’s to be thankful for what you’ve got.
More information on Peace Boats activities can be found here.
Photo galley here.
All of the pictures are with HUGE thanks to Carla who has written some very interesting and detailed captions for them on her Facebook page, here.
