A second hotel has been working on cleaning up. For five months. With a crew of three. Volunteers came alongside and it's going a lot faster.
The first hotel is close to finishing up the dishes. It's taken three months to get everything washed.
Granny loved her special-order meal. She wants Kin-chan to visit her in her new apartment and cook an egg omelet roll now and then. She even gave me instructions on how to come find her place, come September. Maybe I will.
What do you do when you're a small church with a big building, and a disaster hits the city? Sure. You help with the disaster. Gather volunteers. So many that the church members are outnumbered. And the volunteers hardly know that there are church members that call this place home. How do we volunteers keep from overrunning their space? Respect runs too thin sometimes.
We volunteers had a prayer time last night for the church members here. Five months is a long time to be right in the middle of this, all the time. May healing flow, and strength.
It was a delight to see an evacuee, who lost her community to the tsunami, having a compassionate conversation in the cafe with an evacuee from the nuclear zone.
Sometimes it gets touchy between those two groups. Too much comparison. Too much grumbling about which one is whining. Who does and who doesn't get compensation money from the government.
A triple-disaster story I hadn't heard before. Earthquake, tsunami, and then fire. An eerie glow seen looking down from the middle school on the hill that night after the tsunami, from the burning town on the shoreline and the glow out at sea from the lights of fishing boats that were sailed far out to sea, successfully saved from the tsunami. Many of the vessels left along the shoreline were destroyed. Risky move, sailing those vessels. But a fisherman's vessel is that precious.
Sinus problems and mild fevers among the exhausted long-term volunteers.
Talk of needing to start preparing for winter. Heater tables (kotatsu) and space heaters will be needed fairly soon. And clothing. Does anybody have winter clothes ready?
There are new issues to face every day. This crisis mode is starting to seem normal. Keep praying. Normalcy is still a long way off.
But a 15-year-old girl brought some to the cafe today, in the form of four bottles of nail polish. Tired faces of women of all ages turned into giggly cuties. A hard-working fishery woman who lost both her home and her factory got shimmering pink nails for the first time in 35 years.
No. Nail polish doesn't really solve anything. But those smiles will help them keep going a little while longer.
That's a win.
No comments:
Post a Comment