No day, but today

With Silver week came another opportunity to volunteer with PeaceBoat for a weekend in Ishinomaki.  Much like the July trip, we went up with the British Chamber of Commerce (BCCJ), slept on the bus two nights, and stayed at the same shelter.

It was nice returning to the city a third time.  Each time the progress is more visible; each time the work becomes a little more positive.  This time, we worked for two days clearing rubble from the shore, so that the residents could finally enjoy their beach again. A city bus driver took us from the shelter down to the coast.

The work day began with the morning taiso exercises as usual.

Much like hauling wheelbarrows of mud, this work took a lot of strength. The logs and pieces of debris were large at first.  Working as a team, we passed the splintered wood and shattered plastic up the beach stairs in sections.  At the top, everything was tossed over the edge into an endless trash pile.

So much rubble had built up in places, we had to be careful for our own safety.  Once – trying to work quickly –  I got too close to some other volunteers who were hauling a heavy log.  When they swung it onto the pile, it came smashing back down onto my foot.  Fortunately, I was only bruised.  Other boards had many nails and broken bits of fiberglass.  I was lucky.

Later on, as the larger items were cleared away, the work became a little less physically intense.  Some of the volunteers and I went out to the edge of the shore, picking up small things from the sand.  A million little plastic caps, medical items, poly-foam, pill bottles, children’s toys, and things that couldn’t even be identified filled our white burlap sacks.  Some things we found made us sad, other things – we were simply baffled at how they could have even ended up there.  With the sea roaring and the sun beating down, it was easy to get lost in the endless collection of it all.  Looking up, we were surprised how far we had drifted from the group.  Where had it all come from? What was the story here?

For lunch breaks, our bus driver was kind enough to have the bus waiting so we could escape the sun.  Tying plastic bags to our boots, we stepped on the bus to enjoy our mid-day onigiris that were provided for the volunteers.  The inside walls of the bus had become a museum of graffiti.  Japanese and English messages scattered everywhere, we could see the short but detailed history of all the volunteers who had shared this ride for months before us.  Some of them had been on teams to rid houses of dust mites, others – more cleaning crews.  Many of the messages were positive words of hope for the locals, messages of encouragement, or else simply stating things how they were.  The one message that stands out in our minds – as we rode and ate on that same bus for two days – scribbled across the back wall read, “No day…but today.”

photo by Keisuke Furuya

The second day, we worked on the side of the beach that was half flooded; it was a bit messier work here, requiring more hauling. As we saw the beach finally looking like a beach again, we became frantic to finish and bask in the end product of our labor.

By the end of it, our boots were filling with the stagnant water and our gloves were drenched.  Some of the volunteers had to go splash themselves in the ocean to clean off.  The sun, lower in the sky, made our last glance at the sea worth it.  Almost a beach again, we all hoped the locals could finally feel more comfortable wandering down to the shore.  It was the least we could do to ease their long and painful journey, rebuilding their relationship with the sea again.

beauty and the mess

July 16-18 we went up to volunteer in Ishinomaki again for the long weekend.  This trip was shorter, we didn’t have to camp, and the city had made a lot of visible progress in some areas.  In some ways this time was more moving than the last.  People are giving their lives another shot, facing the problems, surviving, opening up, existing.

Friday night we met our team; we went up with a group from the British Chamber of Commerce, an opportunity that arose from one of my husband’s former volunteer friends.   We introduced ourselves and boarded a charter bus together for the overnight trip from Shinjuku. Tired from working all day and then the rush to Tokyo, I dozed off quickly.  The wavy Tohoku expressway woke me up with its bumps a few hours later.

After a rough night’s sleep, we arrived in Ishinomaki in time for morning taiso excercises, a quick breakfast, a not-so-quick meeting, and we were off with wheelbarrows, shovels, and sand-bags to our first site.

Our job for these two days of work was rather interesting.  Before us was a grassy lot with a small fragment of what must have been a stone enclosure. The tsunami had toppled a memorial site – like a graveyard, but with no remains – and covered it with mud.  Grass had grown over it.  In a few days, the neighborhood wanted to hold its annual festival at the site.  So, we had to be the archeologists.  We had to dig out and salvage what we could, dust-it-off and make it fit for the town to gather there again.

One of the men in charge of the site approached it and prayed.  Everyone was silent.  He then told us to prepare ourselves, both body and heart.  We would be digging in tsunami mud and it was uncertain what we would find.  Or what state it was in, I thought in recollection of the fish mission.

We went to work, and it wasn’t long before a not-so-fresh, familiar smell was released.  It was what we would later find out to be 4-month-fermented, soy cattle-feed, and it had an odor not too distant from how I remember the red sea bream.

We had to work carefully because the contents of what we were uncovering was delicate.  The local men in charge were reluctant to let us move quickly because they had a deep attachment with the place.  The memories of their ancestors rested here.  However, as our progress became more visible, they began to relax a little.  They seemed truly happy to see stones uncovered again, many still in decent shape.  By the second day, we were able to work more efficiently.  It was then we finally saw some visual progress of our efforts.

a statue we unearthed

The mid-July heat and lack of shade made the work intense, so we had to take many breaks.  The locals were so kind that they often brought us cold drinks, and even ice cream on our last day.  During these breaks I was able to get to know my teammates better.  Even one of the local men working with us joined us at our break times.  He opened up to us a little.

On the second day, he told us his story.  His mother had died a few years before, and he was in his car with his father at the moment the tsunami came.  Their car was swept up in the waves with them inside it.  Miraculously, it hit something that stopped it, and they were able to wait unharmed for 3 hours before being rescued.   The man took out his cell phone and showed us the image of his car tipped up on end, lodged in the rubble.  What had stopped it was a grave stone.  Coincidentally, it was part of the very same site where his mother’s stone had stood…. He told us the kamisama, or the god(s) must have been looking out for him.

In the evenings after our work day, some interesting events were available for the volunteers to learn more about the area.  On the first day, we were able to take a bus to Onnagawa, a hard-hit area of the city, forever sunken below the sea.   Just before sunset, they allowed us to walk around the area for about 15 minutes and take in the scene.  Everything still stood in devastation, and yet the yellow-oranges of the sunset struck the sides of the ruined buildings, and the sea was astonishingly clear.  It reminded me of lyrics from a song I once heard…beauty and the mess.  After a few pictures and some heavy thinking, we had to go.  The tide covered the roads by a certain time in the evening, and it wasn’t safe to stay.

On the second evening, a local man came to the volunteer shelter to speak.  He delivered a loaded message.  I understood a little of his words at the time, and later a friend of mine translated.   He described scenes for us, difficult for him to re-live.   But he felt it was important to spread the message so that he never had to see those things happen ever again.  So the people of his city needed to follow the old concept passed-on from past centuries: save yourself.  There is an old saying, a traditional rule to adhere in the event of a tsunami, and it seems rather cold, but it is necessary.  Everyone must think only for themselves and just flee.  Drop everything and run; care not for those around you, trust that they will do the same.  As selfish as it seems, the man told us of the lives he saw wasted because people hesitated, didn’t take the warnings seriously, or went back for others.  Rules like this had been born as a way to preserve the society in the face of disaster, and he wished more people had paid attention.   He then went on to finish his speech by talking about the industry and livelihood of the shattered city.  For generations upon generations, Ishinomaki has always thrived from the fishing industry and the sea.  No matter what the sea could do to them, they would always take it back.  He would come to forgive the sea, and it would yield again for the people of the city. I am still astonished by the strength and courage of this man, and of all the affected people.

—-

Even though it seemed we were only there for an instant,  I am happy I was able to go back and help again.  Staying in the shelter -with it’s lack of privacy and abundance of flies – helped me come to terms with how the survivors must have had to live for months.

Also, the volunteer work itself was interesting and enjoyable.  As we boarded the bus Sunday night for the overnight trip back to Tokyo, one of the men from our work site rushed on to bid us goodbye.  It was the man whose mother’s grave had saved him.  He had ridden a bicycle several blocks when he heard our bus was leaving.  He came aboard for a moment and shook each of our team member’s hands with a hearty arigato.  This is the reason I want to go back there again.

gan baru, Tohoku!

and they still need our help, too.

sorting through the entropy

Only now I begin to process it.  For the past 7 days, I’ve been thriving on trail mix lunches, wet-wipe “showers” and positive group energy.   It isn’t until the drive home, the feeling crawls inside my head.  I’m headed south on patched-up Tohoku expressway, 35 miles from Minamisoma’s sensationalized power plant.  I’ve got a full tank of gas and a shower waiting for me at home.  At the same time, a little girl and two little boys are opening their eyes to another day in Ibarazu, Ishinomaki, where mangled cars still sit in their front lawn and another day may pass with no visitors; no help.  Their young noses are now used to the foulest stench I’ve ever experienced in my life, as they play among rubble and jump over toxic drainage ditches. All I can hope is that it stinks a little less for them today.

During the past week, I volunteered with the NGO Peaceboat in the tsunami-hit city of Ishinomaki, Miyagi, Japan.  I worked closely with five other international teammates for seven days and six showerless nights.

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DAY 1 – April 30th

I wiped the fog from the window of the bus around 4:30am.  Dawn was just breaking, and I was in Matsushima. Miyagi.   It was hard to sleep anyway, with the bus constantly bottoming-out on the busted-up road.  Houses appeared normal at first glance, but then I noticed clay shingles were missing and many of them had cracks in them from the earthquake.  We weren’t in the tsunami-hit area yet.   I drifted off to sleep again for a few hours before we arrived at Senshu University.

After a meeting, my team set up camp and ate a quick lunch.  Outfitted in our ‘mud-busting’ gear, we headed on a bus to downtown Ishinomaki where we would learn of our first project.  The main gathering place was at an area called “Ai plaza”.  It was the parking lot that my husbad, Daniel, had helped clear out only weeks earlier.  Now it had become the downtown headquarters  of PeaceBoat‘s relief efforts.  Snacking on Calorie-mates in the parking lot, we waited for our assignment.

We were told we’d be cleaning a movie theater.  Into wheelbarrows we threw shovels, mud bags, scrub brushes, towels, and power-washers.  We put on our helmets, heavy-duty gloves and masks, and headed down the town’s streets to where the theater was located.  These were our first glimpses of the damage:

   

We arrived at the dark, musty shell of a theater.  Most of the seats were still in tact, but the tsunami had destroyed the screen area. We entered the hallway and began setting up the power-washer.  Immediately we noticed the remains of some torn posters on the walls: topless women in provocative positions.  So it was that kind of a theater.  Interesting.  Little did we know that our team would be sent on some of the most ‘special’ missions all week.  While my team members began power-washing and scrubbing the floor, I worked on the bathroom, and then went to the screen up front to see what could be salvaged.  Most of the mud had dried just enough to crack, but it was still soft enough to mold like clay.  I picked up the chunks and filled the mud bags.  The stuff underneath was more liquid-like and required a shovel.  After carrying the bags outside, I realized their weight and started filling them with less sludge.  I didn’t want to wear out quickly.

One of the theater owners handed me the power-washer and gestured for me to begin washing the seats.  They were orange, leopard-print and filthy.  The man held down each seat as I sprayed it, and seemed eager for me to work fast and get through all the seats.  “Jikan ga nai” he told me, worried that we wouldn’t have time to finish.  Perhaps it was the first and last day in a long time that volunteers would help in this theater. Even with over 300 NGO volunteers, we were still spread pretty thin.  The destruction in the city was overwhelming.  The pressure of the spray brought out the sludge in the seats’ upholstery, and they only became more and more brown.  I was astonished that anyone would want to keep the seats as they were,  but I tried to do my best.  The afternoon soon passed, and we headed back to the port area to get sprayed down by yet another power washer.

             

It had been a rather weird day.  Yet as I passed some people on the street, they expressed appreciation for our presence in the city as volunteers.  I was happy to be there.

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DAY 2 – May 1st

On the second day, we were led to a community center across from a park.  Our job was to make it clean enough for serving food.  Before we could work inside of the building, we had to remove all the junk from the front yard and entrance area.  We carted it in wheelbarrows and dumped it in the temporary garbage pile that had formed across the street.  The heap included everything from a broken washing machine, furniture, toys, to even a decent snowboard.  I felt bad just tossing it all away; it probably meant something to someone somewhere…but shoganai; ruined.    Working our way inside the building, we scrubbed every surface.  By midday, the floor of the building was visible again.  It took about 4 to 5 people and lots of squeegees to mop the excess water from the bathroom, but we finished it quickly.  We polished the place by running zokins (rags) along the floor.

             

___________

Day 3, 4 – May 2nd & 3rd  Ibarazu “fish” project:

On the third day, we  agreed to another ‘special’ mission.  Even now, I cannot believe the level of nastiness I endured.  The district of Ibarazu, Ishinomaki was especially hard-hit by the tsunami.  When we got there, it seemed like only roads and bodies had been cleared.  Everything else appeared as it was after the waves hit on March 11th.

       

the inside of a hospital

On top of this, the town had a unique problem that was evident in the smell of the air.  In the heart of this fishing community, there was a cannery storing tons and tons of fresh fish and seafood in fridges.  It was all sorted, in bags and boxes, ready to be shipped away for canning.  The tsunami had rushed in and busted the place open, destroying the coolers and dumping loads of fish in every corner of town, in places one would never imagine.  More than a month later, the rotting bags of seafood remained, and the entire town reeked of rotten fish corpses.  Not even a heavy dust-mask could shield me from the stench.  It was enough to consider holding my breath.

Our job was to search through the toxic rubble and remove the rotten fish.  We had to help relieve the locals of the smell.  There was everything ranging from mid-sized red sea bream (tai), to squid, to half-meter-long tuna. The wasted catch had to be worth millions; the Japanese say motainai, “such a waste!”

        

In the first 30 minutes I found my first ‘wet’ bag, and I seriously doubted if I could continue the work.  With only one layer of gloves as my protection (later I doubled-up), I peeled back dried, prickly red tai to uncover a slimy mess of liquid flesh and maggots.  I reeled back, gagged, and suppressed the urge to vomit.  It was so foul it made me dizzy.

 

The sun’s heat, my waterproof suit, and the weight of the bags didn’t make matters easier.  Harnessing every bit of mind-power, I thought about people living in the neighborhood and continued the work.  Some men from the town even worked beside us.  One of them walked around with a large hook and dug out the slimy specimens for bagging.  He made a gagging noise every time he flopped a fish down.  Squid juice splattered on my suit.  A wave of nausea hit me, but I managed to hold it together.

A kind local woman brought us water and candy during a break.  I didn’t want to touch anything with my unsanitary suit, so she invited me into her house to wash off.  Smelling of foul rotten-sea, and drenched in toxic substances, she still insisted I use her bathroom.  Inside her house, the first floor was bare of furniture but neatly swept.  She handed me a fresh towel.  I noticed the calendar on her wall was still on the month of March.  I managed to give her the warmest ‘aritgato–‘ I could muster.  I just couldn’t think of anything else to say.

The fish-bagging continued.  Surprisingly, I was able to get used to it.  My team was crucial in keeping the spirit light, calling our job ‘fishing’ and cracking the occasional sushi joke.  It might seem bizarre, but when we were knee deep in black slime of what was once squid, we could do nothing but try to laugh at our situation in order to push onward.  To my own amazement, we even volunteered to go back a second day.  In truth, I knew it would take some serious willpower to wake up in the morning to more maggots.  I thought of the residents who dealt with the smell every day.

When work began again the following day, there were three small children walking amongst the rubble near us: a girl and two little boys.  They teased some of us volunteers and told us we all smelled foul.  It was true; I laughed.  When the girl stepped over the wall, Rima -my team leader – instinctively warned her, “abunai yo!”  The reality is that this trash heap had become a toxic playground for these children, and they are still living here.  I pushed this tragic thought from my mind; I needed the energy to get myself through another rancid day.

a toxic playground

 

At the end of that day, we sprayed down and scrubbed our boots.  I felt proud of the work we had done, but secretly guilty because I never wanted to do anything like it ever again in my life.  I’m not going to lie. Some of the village locals thanked all the volunteers before we left the area for good.  One man took my hand in both of his and thanked me over and over.  Another local had tears in his eyes.  In that moment, despite my previous thoughts, I would have agreed to to do it all over again.

It made it all worth it: every revolting second.

____________

DAY 5 – May 4th

Our suits had aired-out overnight, but the smell was still strong when we had to climb back into them that morning.  Some other volunteers made comments about a ‘fishy’ odor.  They simply had no idea.  We apologized for the stink we brought into to the crowded bus of volunteers. We gathered supplies at ‘Ai Plaza’ and trudged in gum boots down to a restaurant opposite the port.   It looked like it had once been very nice, serving kaiseki ryōricuisine.  When we went inside, it was nothing but a shell.  The kitchen would remain, but everything else would go.  Our task was to scrub down the kitchen and wash the remaining china that was once used to serve meals of several courses.   We prepared brushes and buckets of soap, then started to put a dent in the salvaged collection.

(photo by Rima Hosoyamada)

(photo by Rima Hosoyamada)

First I separated broken pieces from the rest, and scooped out the dirt and sludge before the pre-rinse.  After that, the dishes went through 3 more buckets before they were considered dishwasher-ready.  The work was easy compared to the past two days.  My team members and I agreed it was a much-needed break. It was encouraging to see the progress.  The china went from sludgy-brown to it’s original vibrance.

before                                                  (photo by Rima Hosoyamada)

after                                               (photo by Rima Hosoyamada)

As I went back into the kitchen to work off the grime from walls and counter, I thought about returning to Ishinomaki someday, years from now.  I want to come back to that very restaurant.   With chopsticks I’ll pick tsukemono and sushi from the very dishes I had once scrubbed.  I’ll know the history in the ceramic.  I’ll drink tea from a cup and think, this dish once had sludge and broken memories inside it.

____________

DAY 6 – May 5th Children’s Day

We started off the morning by riding the Peaceboat bikes down to the city.

(photo by Rima Hosoyamada)

(photo by Rima Hosoyamada)

Our first order of business was moving some soaked tatami mats and debris from houses in the neighborhood near the community center.  The work became quite personal.  Imagine the contents of your own house strewn about your yard in overwhelming heaps.  We often had to stop and ask the residents if they wanted to keep or trash their possessions.  I was about to throw away a small mud-soaked plastic bin, when the woman of the house stopped me.  She took it and hastily washed it out with her garden hose.

One problem we often had to address was where to put the trash.  The city of Ishinomaki was already well over it’s capacity for pick-up.  Neighborhood parks, streetside gutters, and backyards became temporary landfills.  For one house, we had to cart wheelbarrows full of ruined items to a playground dump blocks away.  It was heavy, sweaty, work.  After every job, the residents thanked us.  I often searched for a fit response, but could find none.

a temporary neighborhood dump

On our way back to Ai Plaza for lunch, we noticed a few open shops, and even an open restaurant.  The menu was basic, but we stopped in for a meal to support the business.  The walls inside had some cracks, and the tables were simple, scrubbed raw with no cloth.  It was surprisingly clean.  Some locals were eating pasta at the bar when we walked in.  A hopeful sign for a city that lost everything just over a month earlier.

After lunch, we joined an assembly line of sludge bags.  Starting at the Ai Plaza area, I loaded 4-6 bags of mud in my wheelbarrow at a time, and walked them several blocks over to a dump near the port.   Over and over, with each trip my forearms burned a little more than the previous one, with my only rest being the walk back to Ai Plaza to get another load.  The locals would sometimes say “good work” and “thank you” as I passed them with my barrow-load.  I focused on this (and the great training my arms were getting for rock climbing!).   By the end of the day, my feet ached and my back was sore, but it was a good day of physical work.  I felt good.

While we waited for the bus to take us back to camp, a local man was heating up cans of coffee and cocoa for volunteers.  He had built a small oven in front of Ai Plaza, using bricks from the rubble.

This square become a gathering place for people.  Volunteers relaxed after hard work and shared stories, and sometimes curious locals stopped by to express thanks.  On this day, the mood was even more cheerful than usual.  It was Children’s Day, a popular national holiday in Japan.  Earlier, Peaceboat had given out toys and clothes for children at this site.  Now there was a local woman with a CD player pretending to play a decorated shovel like a shimasen.  Volunteers joined in.  The outside of the square was lined with flower boxes donated from an organization called ‘seeds of hope’.  Messages of encouragement hung from a tree near the “coffee oven”, and our team signed one of the flower boxes.

Team ‘Aloha for Ishinomaki’                             (photo by Rima Hosoyamada)

____________

DAY 7– May 6th

After a few transportation switch-arounds and bumps in the road (our van driver literally smashed into the curb on the way to our assignment), we arrived at the house we would be cleaning for the day.   Right from the start, there was something strange about the place.  Peering into the first-floor tatami, it looked untouched since the tsunami came through.   An old woman who had lived there was the one to call for volunteer help, but she was living in an evacuation center nearby.  However, her son had been carrying on as usual in the upstairs of the house.   He was the one who greeted us at the door.  The situation seemed complicated for sure, but I wasn’t one to judge.   Maybe the mother had health complications and wasn’t fit to stay in the house, but the son didn’t want to burden the evacuation centers with himself?  No questions asked, we just started to go to work on the place.

(photo by Rima Hosoyamada)

(photo by Rima Hosoyamada)

After helping our team remove some of the month-rotten tatamis, the son kindly offered us some coffee and soft drinks from his kitchen upstairs.  He encouraged us to take a break, but it had only been about an hour.  We worked on while he disappeared upstairs. I helped sort through the clothes and contents of the dressers in the old woman’s room.  Most of it was soaked and moldy, but we were instructed not to throw out anything that might be salvageable (until the mother could stop in and say so herself).   We wrapped the driest things in bundles of curtains, and hung up the rest.

By lunchtime, the basic work was finished.  We considered seeking a different assignment for the afternoon, but the smell from the kitchen and the fridge still lingered.  I think we all had the feeling it wasn’t going to be handled anytime soon.  We decided to stay and polish off the kitchen.  Later, we were glad we had.

looking like a kitchen again!          (photo by Rima Hosoyamada)

As we were rinsing our buckets after finishing, a neighborhood local wandered over to say hi.  From him we learned the full story.

He said that he had heard the earthquake coming before it hit on March 11th.  In this neighborhood, the water had came slowly, only flooding the houses a few inches, but it took two whole days to recede.   The neighbors hadn’t known about it at the time, but the elderly woman of the house had broken her back in the earthquake.  Two days later, rescue officials found her on the first floor and took her to the evacuation center.  The son, who had to be well over 30 with no job, was living upstairs the entire time.

Even in disaster, the lives of individuals are more complicated than one might imagine.

_________

What to make of all this?  I volunteered for a week, to do the same work that affected locals have had no choice to do for more than a month.  To be honest, my writing this has largely been a catharsis of my own self-interest.   There are always chances to help people in the world.  Yet I didn’t make a move until I was physically shaken underfoot.  Of course I was driven by sincerity and compassion, but I also did this to fill a space in my mixed-up mind.  Somewhere between my craving for adventure and the need to feel forward motion, I’ve been wondering what to do with myself.

And another confession:  I spent more time laughing than crying.  I was well-fed, equipped, supported by teammates, and over-thanked. I didn’t really consider it hardship at the time. Nevertheless, it has indeed satisfied a void in my soul.  The world is full of tsunamis and typhoons, war, thirst and confusion.   Sometimes the earth spits up and churns over itself again.  It can be thought of as good, bad, profound, or meaningless.  Existence is just the moments of sorting through the entropy.

I want to do it again.

info about Peaceboat volunteering/ donations: http://www.peaceboat.org/english/index.php?page=view&nr=19&type=22&menu=62

snapshots of memories washed away

My husband, Daniel, returned from volunteering in Ishinomaki with pictures: a glimpse of a different world, a place that once was.  Even the memories that people had tucked away in nice little albums have been torn from them.  And for so many, memories are all they have left:

View more at his photostream here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielpierce/

His volunteer blog: http://daniel-and-emma.tumblr.com/post/4524954967/volunteering-in-ishinomaki/

info about donations: http://www.peaceboat.org/english/index.php?page=view&nr=19&type=22&menu=62