Transition

Back in Maine now. Feels very odd to see everything so... normal and less broken.

I'm lying on a heating pad to help with a bruised rib I got by tripping over luggage and colliding with a stair step during my last week in Japan. It's just an outside echo of how tired my heart is right now. Away from the disaster zone, I'm finding myself only barely browsing facebook posts from friends who are still working as volunteers. I'm skipping their blog posts entirely, and rarely reading articles they recommend. (No offense. I do love you.) I barely glanced through the National Geographic tsunami article, and avoided the pictures. But I do notice the quakes, perhaps too much. Certainly more than I did while I was in Japan. Maybe because the epicenter is at Mount Fuji. She tends to activate after a major quake, and I fear for her foothills and for Tokyo.

And yet I know my Stateside friends are wanting to hear stories from the front lines. I'll be glad to tell you. And I will need to tell you. But please be gentle for a while. They're stories of real people and real places. And talk to me about your everyday things, like coffee and breakfast pancakes and getting along with grandma. It's a big shift, coming back.

Eventually I'll resume reading volunteer blogs and news articles. My heart will settle into living in two places at once. Just give me a little time to regain my balance. And pray for the many local volunteers in Japan who don't have the luxury of leaving the disaster behind, like I do. Or do I? It's too soon to tell where the healthy balance point is.

I'll get ungarbled soon. Bear with me.

Iwaki

Stopped by Iwaki for a day and a half to check some pulses, including my own.

One of the quieter ones was finally relaxed enough to tell her story of how afraid she was during the March 11 quake, how the power was out that night, and how she wishes she had been a good enough driver to be able to evacuate from the nuclear zone using back roads, instead of the shoreline road where her eighth-grade child saw such scary sights and kept asking her whether they could please just go home. Nobody should see a car lodged in the side of a building, and that much destruction. The sight of places she knew... Her house in the nuclear zone smells empty, she says. Feels odd that anyone lived there. Appliances ruined from leaving mid-everything. Weeds up to her head. Animals either dead, dying, or gone wild. Cows eyeing her house, in the middle of town. But her whole family is settling into their new life well, and they'll probably stay here in Iwaki for a good long while.

Another friend smiles brighter and stands stronger than I've ever seen. She has had strong opinions all along about the power company that runs the nuclear plant. Her husband works there now, until his radiation exposure count reaches the maximum level allowed. She's taking the whole thing in stride. Cleanup needs to happen, and it's a job. Something about seeing her do extremely normal things, like pick up her teenager from school, makes me smile.

The lady across the street didn't have a smile this summer. She does now. She asked whether it's cold in America now, and gave me two scarves. Gifting is good. It's a life thing.

The staff are earthquake-jaded. I was in the middle of a serious conversation with one of the staff when a strong quake hit. Intensity 4 or low-5, depending on where you got the news. She just plain kept talking. I got a little distracted by the building shaking so much, laughed at how casual she was about it, and asked her to repeat what she just said. I, uh, wasn't listening.

Another familiar face didn't take it so well. She was at a party when the quake hit, and it scared her so badly that she started to cry and asked her friends to please take her home. She needed to be home. Some wounds are still raw.


Normal life stuff is happening for the high-school girl at the convenience store. Graduation. Placement at a full-time job. Buying a car. Good, everyday, growing-up stuff.

Volunteer work is at a low ebb. The disaster is old news and interest is waning. Rebuilding begins soon. New neighborhoods are in the planning stages. There's a shift from short-term relief work to long-term cooperation. It's unclear exactly what rebuilding will look like, and what kind of volunteer work will be involved. But Global Mission Center will be there doing whatever it takes.

Me? I hate to leave. But I'm glad to see life on the upswing, and the stubborn determination of the long-termers who have outright moved to Iwaki City. Good ol' Kinchan is still talking logistics of how to feed a crowd. Pastor Mori has a fierceness to him, a passion to see this through, to see his city fully recovered and walking with God.

Teenagers, both normal-looking and punkish, think the church belongs to them. It does. They keep the adults on their toes. It's a good thing.

There are even a few love stories flitting about. Marriage, engagement, and isn't-he-absolutely-gorgeous. Good stuff.

Life is winning. The story isn't over yet. The good news is, it won't be over for a long, long time.

I love you, Iwaki. Keep winning.

Miyako

Miyako, the city that grabbed my heart back in August. I finally got the chance to spend a week there, just before returning to the States.

Miyako now contains what used to be the town of Taro, which once boasted the “world’s greatest seawall,” a double wall ten meters (30 feet) high. Part of that seawall is still there, but it was no match for the giant wave. The devastation is extreme.

There is a long-term worker there, backed by a network of churches that have pledged long-term support of the people of Taro. Sure, sometimes that support looks a bit non-traditional. You may not think it includes celebrating a quirky inventor’s 63rd birthday. But it does. The inventor lost everything and found a place to live in the undestroyed part of town, but he can’t really start on renovations or make solid plans for the future until the city decides whether it’s going to mandate raising the ground level in his neighborhood by several feet. That would mean tearing down his current house. Behind his humor lurks some deep fatigue and a lot of uncertainty. This year, of all years, is the right time to go make some hot-pot stew at his house and gather around the blanketed winter table to celebrate reaching his 63rd. We like having him around. I think we got that across, somewhere in between the jokes and songs and conversations and birthday cake.

The local beautician has a second chair, but nowhere to put it in her tiny temporary shop. This week’s volunteer team has carpentry skills. Eh, who needs that much space to take off shoes anyway? A frame and some concrete and a little sliver of flooring and there you go. Enjoy your extended floor. The shoes can stand being crowded together. Let’s get some more customers in here.

Word came in from the long-term workers working in Yamada, the next town over. There’s a temporary housing unit they haven’t visited yet, and they need people to help with hosting a coffee time. We pitched in. Yarn and knitting needles and crochet hooks went along too. So did boxes of winter clothes.

The café method has worked wonders over the last few months. And relief goods distribution has been necessary. They’re starving for things to do, so the knitting and crocheting went over very well. But pesky problems are popping up, in the form of people swarming the boxes of goodies a little too eagerly, and heading home without really connecting much. They have no way of knowing that these volunteers are different from the others, and aren’t just going to swoop in, do something nice, and disappear forever.

I feel half-an-inch tall to be in this area for only a week, and to have to disappear because of visa regulations. But the long-term volunteers will be here. They’re asking the right questions: Only relatively cheerful people show up to the café time. How do we reach the people who don’t come? The goods distribution is becoming a mixture of need and greed. When is the right time to cut off the relief goods and focus on heart care? They are starving for activities. Do we need people who can teach the activities, or just facilitators? Do we need to look for volunteers with specific skills? Beauticians? Carpenters? Do we dare to enter the realm of starting cottage industries, or do we connect the people to already existing business initiatives? What’s next? How? When?

Then there are the kids. Ah, kids. I got to spend Saturday at an after-school daycare program in Miyako. Other than not being able to say “see you later” at the end, it was a perfect day. Balloons, jump rope, tie-up-the-adult, kick-the-can, playing ball, puzzles, you name it we did it.

On the surface they looked like any other group of kids. But one second-grader, while scrambling up a slide to go fetch her balloon, told me about how her granny died in the tsunami at the factory by the sea. The other workers had gone to higher ground, but granny and the company president stayed behind. They found granny’s body, but not the president’s. Her house is OK. It was just barely high enough. There’s another little girl in this daycare who lost her granny too.

We talked about granny a while. Wish I could have met her.

And on the surface the teachers looked like any other teachers. But while I knitted a sample for one teacher to use with the knitting kids on Monday, she told me she’s 76. She does know what retirement is. She just ignores it. Besides, her house got washed away and she got away with only her life. She lives in an apartment close to this school now. She did think of quitting her teaching job, but they transferred her from classroom duty to this after-school daycare program, and she’s going to keep working for a few more years. She gets extra gumption from the kids each day, she says.

I hate getting just the beginning of stories without seeing them through to the end. But there are good solid long-termers here who will take it from here. Keep praying for the long-termers. For the ones already here, it’s been a long, long ten months. They’re absolutely exhausted. Some are getting much-needed rest. Some are not. For the ones just arriving, unless they’re extremely careful, they will get exhausted too. There are short-termers and mid-termers to recruit, corral and direct. There are local relationships to build. Givers often forget to check their own pulse.

My time in Iwate is over for now. I only got a snapshot of what is happening here. But there are faces and places to pray for. That much I can do from wherever I am.

Hurry up, train. I can’t take this goodbye much longer.

In weakness

I wonder if I'm too weak for this. I can't bring myself to buy one of those local tsunami photo books that are in convenience stores in every devastated city. I can't watch tsunami footage. I see the ocean and automatically brace myself to see devastation. I can't buy key holders that are made out of debris from homes and businesses, even to raise money for a good cause. I don't take very many photos of the devastation anymore. I cried as I left Ofunato, because there are people I love there.

But maybe my response is within the range of normal. Maybe that's exactly why I'm here, to just come alongside for a while. Nobody should be strong enough for what has happened. The people who show me their tsunami book only show me their own neighborhood, and where their own house used to be. Many of them can't watch the footage either. Some still fear driving by the shoreline. They've had enough of disaster tourists snapping pictures of their tragedy. They cry out of sheer relief when they meet a friend they hadn't seen for several years. You can only ask "Do you know if they survived?" so many times before it wears you out.

This leg of my journey is coming to a close in a week and a half. As we gather for our weekly meeting, I notice a major shift in the members of the team. I'm the only mid-termer in the bunch. There's only one short-termer this week. There are three young men who see that the needs on the shoreline aren't going away any time soon. They've each promised to stay for a year. Then there are the two preachers, who are lifetimers.

Don't get me wrong here. Short-termers are extremely valuable. So are mid-termers who can come for several months at a time. But now, ten months into the tragedy, I'm glad to see the long-termers in place. Some of them may make a lifetime of it. And I'm ready to throw my support behind them, both in remembering to pray and in checking on what the current needs are. One of them is getting my sleeping bag, along with the spillover prayers from my friends in Maine who gave it to me.

During my blog silence, partially brought on by my iPhone breaking down (insert "Awww" here), I headed south again to my old hometown in Kochi. I was greeted with a "Welcome home" and more food than anyone should ever have in one sitting. (The opinion of this blog writer does not necessarily match the opinion of the kitchen management.)

We visited Dad's grave again, and I found myself repeating what so many in the disaster zone have said about their recently departed relatives--that I'm glad Dad went Home before this disaster hit, and that he didn't have to go through it at his age. My friends just listened.

Then we did what I had needed for months. We went to the ocean. A normal, peaceful ocean with a walkable beach, with all the seawall in place, and all the trees still growing along the shore, and no mystery debris on the sand, and the flimsy-looking boardwalk still flat and functional and perfectly in place. Houses nearby with the first floor intact. Buildings up on the hill unchanged since my childhood. The pine trees looked fragile to me (may the day come soon when six-inch diameter trees look sturdy again), but all was well.

Ocean breezes, snack foods, and benches often lead to friends dropping their guard a little and sharing heavy secrets. I was glad to carry part of the load, and hear a story that didn't include a wall of water. Just sitting there, staring oceanward, munching on octopus dumplings and hearing her world. We needed that more than either one of us will ever understand.

I stopped by Yokohama, and was welcomed home. I returned to Morioka in the northlands, and was welcomed home again. Something tells me I'll be welcomed home to Maine too. I'm ready to push pause for a little while.

But first, a week in the Miyako City area. The jigsaw puzzles and yarn and knitting needles and kid toys are ready. So am I.

Tokyo gift

Dear Kind Lady in Tokyo:

Thank you so much for sending your childhood crochet hook case with a full set of hooks, and the yellow and wine-red yarns. When we met, you heard what my American friends sent with me, and wanted to participate. Thanks for jumping in. 

Maybe you thought it would bring someone a little income. A home business of sorts. It still might, since there are a lot of hooks left. But initially, it brought smiles, rest, and something to do. 

About thirty-five tired and cooped-up kids, moms, and grandmas from Fukushima City came North to a Christian campground to play and rest. 

What a different world for them. No radiation to keep them indoors. Only the cold air to force their playtime to end. Edible snowballs (which are quite yummy--I had a couple myself). Ground to roll around on. No moms worrying about future thyroid problems when you tube down the hill and get a faceful of snow. Indoors, the only enemy to shriek and run from or attack was the rather abundant number of stinkbugs taking shelter for the winter. 

I didn't see much of your yarn. After outside play was over, it got buried in the middle of a swarm of girls from age five to seventy-seven. Occasionally a little girl would pop out of the swarm with a ball of yarn and ask how to finger-knit. And here and there I saw the gold flash of crochet hooks in the hands of the adults. 

After a while there were finger-knitted scarves all over the place. Even the preacher man joined in and made one. The girls now have one more thing they can do indoors when they get home, and hopefully they will remember the safer world that's still out here. 

Granny scarves took a while longer. One little boy found one of the grannies fascinating, and learned how to chain stitch, and asked her for the striped yellow and wine-red scarf she made. Granny smiles are gorgeous. 

And mom. She barely mentioned in passing that she had lived in temporary housing for a while. She took home two of your hooks for a restart. One for lace and the other for regular yarn. 

Once the smaller girls found out I also had hair ties in my pocket for them, they mobbed mom for crocheted hair ties. A tie plus yarn plus an adult with a crochet hook. Simple. Mom was busy for a while, but didn't seem to mind much. 

All of this was punctuated with cries of STINKBUG!! It generally meant someone had to catch it. Sometimes it meant reassuring a scared little girl that it's OK to be scared, but that the stinkbug won't hurt her. Sometimes it was already heroically or accidentally squished. Occasionally it meant coaxing a kid out of hiding, or accompanying a kid to the bathroom just in case a stinkbug might appear. 

Ah, manageable monsters. 

So thank you. The results of your gift may look rather normal so far. That's as it should be. It's been such an abnormal year.