Yeah, yeah, yeah...

Every single evening meeting, someone says how horrible the tsunami was. How it busted a house. How they don't have words to describe it. I was getting a severe case of yeah-yeah-itis. I mean, every single night. About the same places. After a couple of months here, even the tragedy was getting old. 

So when I was invited along to go see some of the damage, I decided to go. High time I saw it again for myself. 

Foundations. Lots and lots of foundations. Every one of them with lots of stories, gone. 

Entire areas that the government has deemed unsafe to live. Homes being cleaned out in preparation for destruction. 

Drums and the sharp smell of incense from nearby Buddhist festivals to placate the dead. 

Quiet singing of "Not by might, not by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord."

A bright pink kindergarten, shredded. There are only a few bouquets of flowers in front of the building. I can only hope that only a few little ones were lost. 

A green kindergarten in another part of town, gutted. No flowers or incense that I could see. What a harrowing evacuation that must have been. Thanks, teachers. 

Over the years I've seen many photos from war-ravaged areas, showing building damage. They were taken months, even years after the damage was done. I thought the people just didn't bother with repairs, and didn't care. 

I'm sorry. I was wrong. 

They do care. Five months after the tsunami, the several-foot layer of debris is gone, and so are half of the ravaged buildings. The giant ships are removed. The piles of fishing boats are much smaller, and so are the piles of fire-torched cars. The gutted houses still standing are the ones with milder damage, or the ones harder to clear out. There's just so much to do. It'll take a year just to tear things down. Longer to reconstruct. It's far from over. 

The rice merchant family we visited is doing well, and was delighted with the diapers we dropped off for grandma. 

The pharmacist looks sharp in his white coat, and his new shop is very inviting. The old awning is up again, and he's back in business. Seeing him back in shopkeeper mode did my heart good. 

The softball park has been repurposed to hold the mounds and mounds of debris from the area. There's no telling how many homes those mounds used to be. 

Three closed swimming beaches. Do you understand how much tourist money has been lost this summer, just by closing those beaches?? Neither do I. But with a lot of the breakwater blocks gone, even I could tell that one of those beaches was no longer safe. Not with those waves. 

A breakwater block was in a river, two blocks from the ocean. 

A totally gutted 7-11 convenience store, no windows or doors or even walls to speak of, is in business. Looks kinda war-zone-like, but they're back. Gotta love their spunk. We stopped for ice cream. 

Two well-kept parks. Hardly a local person around. Nobody but out-of-towners are on the lawns. Locals are afraid of radiation in the soil and in the grass. 

But one of the families enjoying the playground at the second park was from Fukushima City. Their kids hadn't played outside in months, and definitely not on playground equipment. They were here visiting Grandma. The radiation contamination is so much lower here, and the kids had been cooped up for so long... 

Never have you seen happier, sweatier kids. 

That was quite a tour of the ravaged part of town, and quite a contrast with the beautiful nearly-empty parks. My yeah-yeah-itis is cured. I'll be able to check on the new arrivals after evening meetings now. 

So what if the stories repeat? God help us, it's shocking out there.