Golden Week

A cluster of national holidays in the first week of May creates "Golden Week"vacation time for the nation. This year, for Heather and Laura, it was "Muck Week" in the Tohoku disaster zone.

In addition to helping clean up the mess the tsunami left behind, Heather had an opportunity to do a program for children at a nearby church.

Friday was a golden opportunity for us to have a meal together as a family for the first time since Laura had arrived back from Canada the previous Thursday. She and Heather headed up north shortly after that.  

The Only Constant is Change

It's a challenge building a relief organization from scratch after the disaster has taken place, and with a constant stream of volunteers coming and going. CRASH is now entering its third month of response to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and since Carol has been at CRASH from the beginning, she's now in charge of screening for volunteer teams, and oversees a staff of helpers.
This is the volunteer coordination table at the CRASH HQ, which was once a convenience store. Chuck, on the left, came in from California. The woman at the end of the table is here from England. The others are in-country volunteers, several of whom must return to their day jobs, so they leave, and others must be trained to take their place.

The challenges are worth it as teams cycle in and out of Tohoku doing a huge variety of tasks and making an impact in people's lives.

Because He Lives...

Back in 1969 or so, the Gaithers' music was very popular, and I recall singing it at church often. Quite often. Very often, in fact. "Because He Lives" was probably the most often sung selection in that era.

 Upon arriving in Japan, I struggled to understand the meaning of the songs we sang in church, and one that I developed a new appreciation for was "Shu Wa Ima Ikkite Orareru" which is of course "Because He Lives"

Don Love did a good presentation at our Easter Celebration about Bill Gaither's thoughts leading him to write that song, and it presents the hope given us by the resurrection.

Miwako talked about a popular song that challenged her heart as she was first coming to think seriously about God several years ago.

 



\We showed the resurrection scene from the DVD "Jesus for Children" and then continued the story in living colour in...flannelgraph! What'll they think of next? I guess our presentation for children was both hi-tech and hi-touch.

Our celebration included an Easter feast, and I'm including the annual Carol Love easter cake. If you go back to the blog post entitled "You Saw It Here First" you can admire her empty tomb cake from last year. This year's cake is a little more conventional in design.

バーコード・ヘア

The title is in katakana, a Japanese script for using words borrowed from other languages. It reads "Ba-co-do hea" which is the English term, "Barcode Hair" Well, barcode hair is not an English term, but looking at this picture, it should be, don't you think? This is without doubt my favourite Japanese idiom.

Why Would They Do That?

I've watched a construction project from our balcony since moving back here in 2009. The work on the right is building an apartment tower that will be about fifty stories tall. But, the work on the left looks like a very expensive make-work project.

  I couldn't imagine the cost of this machine digging about 80 feet down, hauling out the soil, only for the backhoe in the foreground to dump the soil back down the hole before the steel sheathing is pulled out. They would move over a few feet and repeat the process.
Then one day I saw the backhoe mixing some powder into the soil before dumping it back down the hole. No doubt that's ground solidifier, to help prevent liquefaction, the phenomenon of soil sinking and water rushing to the surface. 

I suspect that also explains the unusual sight of this barge with the gigantic drill and the large cement hopper. The drill burrows under the river, and as it is pulled up, cement is pumped out of holes near the drill bit to mix with the soil and make it solid.

 

This kind of thing is usually done to prepare the ground for constructing a building. In our case, I think it's firming up the riverbed so we don't have more subsidence like we had after the March 11 earthquake. You'll find that post entitled "We are Sinking" on March 30. Perhaps they're concerned about our reclaimed island shifting sideways into the river, so they're strengthening the riverbed to prevent it. We appreciate the effort, since people in Urayasu in Chiba still don't have water or gas because of all the liquefaction of the ground, not to mention leaning homes and manholes five feet above the road!

"...and other assigned duties"

When you volunteer to work in a disaster area, you need to be flexible and willing to do what is asked of you. I had a chance to talk with one of the members of the volunteer team we drove up to Iwate a couple of weekends ago. I assumed that Lonnie had spent his time with a shovel "mucking out" houses. He told me he had done a number of things, including one that I hadn't thought of.

Particularly for the older residents of the shelters, a foot bath was a necessity, and people lined up at the shelter to have Lonnie perform this service for them. For people who have had a hot bath every night of their lives, living in a shelter is a real hardship, but the daily foot baths are meant to tide people over between real baths. We want to show Christ's love and do Christ's deeds, and sometimes do exactly the same things that He did.

Back to...New Normal

 I'm glad to say progress is being made in recovery efforts, especially at Tagajo, just outside of Sendai. The muck has been swept up, the trashed cars are being removed, and the spoiled and soiled furnishings are piled at the curb for disposal.

Trucks with cranes are hauling away the trashed cars that the tsunami deposited here and there.
Stores were emptied out and washed and disinfected, awaiting new shelving and furnishings. The first to open will do a booming trade! Nothing else in the area is open yet.

 Note the waterline on the window, and the debris washed into the fence. Cars are stacked up in the background. Tagajo did not get a direct hit by the tsunami. The water came in, but not with maximum velocity. Things were completely different in Shichigahama.

 

In Shichigahama, we came over a hill and before us was a debris field as far as the eye could see. This picture doesn't do it justice. The store was gone, but the sign stayed. We saw the store, foundation and all, in the middle of a rice field.  The debris field covered the road, and we had to detour.

This was a clam farm at the beach near our cabin. The building housing the clam farm is gone, and the foundation is undermined as sand was blasted away by the wave.

Inland from the beach the tsunami completely removed the house on the lower level, as well as numerous houses at ground level, but it did not reach the higher level houses. Location, location, location.

 

Don Love walks back from the edge of the beach. The curve of the cliffs at this point lessened the tsunami's force, sparing this house from complete destruction. Houses further from the beach had their first floors reduced to splinters, while the second floor structures would remain intact and float into nearby fields. Many of those fields are still underwater, and the salt in the seawater ruins them for growing crops. It'll be a long way back for Shichigahama.