Lifebeats

Coffee, tea, green tea. (Or, as the Japanese say, coffee, red tea, tea.) Cakes by a real patisserie (or, as bumpkins like me say, by a baker guy), homemade cookies, rice crackers, sweet rice, and a hearty vegetable soup with dumplings (known in some parts as pinch-and-throw). Distribution of veggies, Christmas treelets, winter clothes, and what was left of the soup and dumplings. 

Singing a moldie oldie Japanese country song. Getting everyone to sing Angels We Have Heard On High and Silent Night. Distributing yarn, and finding out I need to bring more crochet needles next time along with some knitting and crochet patterns. 

All that makes a good day. 

But seeing one lady's sad look turn a bit bemused when I gave her a jigsaw puzzle, then start to soften while we talked about music, and turn into a smile while playing Chinese Checkers? Seeing how carefully one little girl chose some cute hair ties? Entertaining two babies with the Mr. Ticklebug puppet? Watching similar things happening all over the room? Seeing the baker guy standing in the kitchen doorway watching all of this and smiling before ducking back in to slice another cake? Hearing the little girl say "Mommy, let's go to the City Christmas on the 22nd"? Seeing grandmas get all excited about plans to make them some fresh mochi (pounded sticky rice) just before New Years?

That's the kind of stuff that makes a great day.

Sure, the grandmas say they'll use part of it for New Year's decorations, but come on. Betcha the decorations will be pretty small. Fresh warm mochi is just too yummy. 

Yesterday afternoon I saw the downtown clock, stopped forever at tsunami time. 

Here's to marking time and celebrating anyway. 

Re-joy us

I scared myself angry a couple of days ago. And that was just from finding out that the turn signals in Japanese cars are not only on the opposite side of the steering wheel, but are also upside down. And finding out by signaling the wrong direction in a busy intersection, in a van that feels like I'm driving a hippo. Fear of hurting my passengers morphed straight into anger, and it took me a while to simmer down. 

So don't be too surprised when an evacuee snarls when she meets a government worker, eight and a half months after the disaster. She fears she's been forgotten, and everything she can see points in that direction. Not even the official information bulletins are getting to her new apartment. She has to seek out the information herself, and she misses chances to get help. 

Another evacuee from the missing city can't bring herself to drive the shoreline road. It's not so much the sight of the devastation. It's the fear of not knowing when another wave will come. 

Stonewalling from some residents of temporary housing. Sure, there was miscommunication involved. But there was fatigue there too, and perhaps a tinge of volunteer overload. There's some trust to rebuild, it seems. 

Fatigue shows up in various forms among long-term volunteers. Some catch colds too easily. Others forget to care for themselves and push themselves into sheer exhaustion. Others fall silent or get cranky (yours truly, guilty as charged). 

Then comes a breath of fresh air. 

"I walked with Jesus by Matsubara Lake. We sang together under the pines."

The staff from the camp in that song are here to volunteer. At first, even I didn't quite understand why we were having them put up Christmas lights at a local church. But as I worked with them, I understood. 

Joy. They brought Jesus with them from Matsubara Lake, and splashed a good solid dose of joy on the front lawn of the church. 

Thanks. We all needed that. One church member died in the wave, along with her twin daughters. Several others are hurting from lost lives, homes, and jobs. 

Christmas is still coming this year. 

Meanwhile, indoors, the tiniest potted Christmas trees, barely a foot tall if that, are being gift-wrapped for 50 households in a temporary housing unit. 

Come on, guys. We have some more joying to do tomorrow when we give out those treelets. I hear rumors of cakes coming too, and I brought cookies. Here goes. 

Tender hearts

Two men who never met, both of them long since dead, worked together to soften injured hearts last night. 

One was a World War II serviceman in the Air Force, named Leo. He smuggled a harpsichord into Japan on an Air Force plane just after the war. It is Japan's first. Nothing fancy, and the keys stick a little. It's a treasure, to be sure. Hardly ever in the public eye. But it got brought to Ofunato last night for a special mini-concert, organized by Child Fund Japan.

Kenji Miyazawa, the famous author. Seems everyone along this coast claims him as "one of us." They don't claim to be his hometown, but he's theirs. He's been gone since the 1930s. 

Mr. Miyazawa's "Night on the Galactic Railroad" is ordinarily a two-and-a-half hour read. A professional reader performed a one-hour abridged version, with harpsichord accompaniment. Stunningly beautiful. 

This story about two boys traveling the Milky Way railroad heading to the afterlife brought many of the audience to tears. Death, the unfathomable grief of parting, the challenge of continuing afterward, and all of this in a story not their own. But I could hear grief for neighbors and family in the tears around me.

Serviceman Leo and Mr. Miyazawa had both seen the aftermath of tragedy in their day. Their help was needed in the current disaster as well. 

May the Healer come into the opened hearts. 

Edge of the blank

How do you describe a city that just isn't there anymore? Where the only thing left is the very outskirts, where anyone driving through would think the city is just around the bend? 

Rikuzen-Takata is gone. Blank. For now, anyway. A young mom and her baby rushed to Grandma's up on the hill after the quake, and survived. Dad and Grandpa made it too. 

Grandma wanted us to know how unfair it is that people taking refuge with relatives don't get the same kind of assistance as those in temporary housing. Why doesn't anyone understand that maybe the families that still have a house might still need help?

But once she got that off of her chest, she went back to being the chronic helping grandma who loves to bake mini poundcakes and wants to make sure all her neighbors are fed and cared for. She'll keep an eye out for any needs in her neighborhood and let us know who needs what. 

You can take her city. You can give every member of her family close calls. You can scare her with the sight of a surge coming up the river. You can tire her out after eight months and even discourage her with the flaws in the system. 

But you can't keep her from feeding and clothing anyone she can reach. You can't erase the delight on her face when she describes how to make pumpkin bread. (Hers has roasted pumpkin seeds in it.) And her ever-so-slight nosiness may result in someone else getting help. 

Yeah, we brought things that she needed. But really, we brought ears and pure enjoyment of her grandbaby, who will be a year old next week. 

If something like that can help grandma keep going, and help find other needs here in the outskirts, I'm game. Life is hard to beat, even here. 

Mom looks sad until she talks about her baby. It took me, an outsider, an extra day after our visit before I could cry for her city. She lived it, and knows what used to be there. She still works for city hall, which has moved to a prefab building almost next door. She has a tough road ahead. 

Remember her when you pray, would you? A city worker for the remaining outskirts of a flattened city. More than that, a mom grieving for more than I can fathom. 

I know Life comes next. I have no idea what that will look like. 

Mercies

"Morning by morning new mercies I see"

Do we really know what that looks like? 

It's the smile of a granny who says all her extra blankets and guest bedding went to relatives on the shoreline who were hit by the tsunami, and she's told her daughters not to visit until spring. There's just no guest bedding left in the house. 

It's the peace in a newlywed couple looking forward to their second strawberry harvest next spring. Last year's harvest came in just after the earthquake. The couple was  fine, and the berries were good, but the agricultural co-op that was supposed to buy their berries was shut down in those early weeks after the disaster. So they just distributed their very first harvest to their neighbors instead, and accepted smiles as payment. 

It's a bit harder to see at first in the jeweler's rented house. His two-generation jewelry/watch/eyeglasses store and home got wiped off of the cityscape. Everything is gone. The wave was big enough to deposit a car on the roof of the bank. Smaller buildings had no chance. 

With his wife and son, he took shelter in a third floor apartment after the quake. The water indoors came up to their knees. Water was swirling outside the window, all the way to the top. 

Mrs. jeweler said it was like being in a fishbowl. She heard debris crashing together outside the window, and knew that if the window broke, they would all be dead. 

It held. Mercy on March 11. 

Snow season just started. Can you imagine your local jeweler asking for a little kerosene stove to warm his house this winter? 

Yes, everyone knows the dangers, but warmth takes priority. It's the easiest and cheapest option that still works during a power outage. 

Maybe bringing it by will be another morning's mercy he can see. 

Needs

"Go down the hill and turn right. Go three blocks, turn right again, go to the three-story apartment building, and our new volunteer building and office are right behind that."

With instructions from the Catholic priest, I was ready to count blocks and watch for landmarks. I wasn't ready for how utterly wrong it would look. The landmarks were the only buildings standing in those three blocks. 

But amidst that sadness, the office is in a newly repaired Japanese house, with delightfully slippery brand-new wood flooring and Japanese furniture. And a healthy autumn vegetable garden is growing outside. Laundry drying on the balcony never looked better. 

Papa God had already comforted me once, a little while earlier today, when I had seen a house in the ocean. The roof and a window were sticking up above the water line. Right about the time that I realized what I had seen and the tears crept into my eyes, I saw a boat-building place, back in business. The brand-new wooden framework around a half-built boat was exactly what I needed to see. Something new. A fisherman's new vessel on its way. 

Councilman Miura spent the day with us again today. We took some groceries to a temporary housing unit, introduced ourselves to the Catholic charity workers, went to a daycare center (which we promised to decorate for Christmas), and gathered information from a long-term volunteer to find out what the remaining needs are. 

Neighborhoods are jumbled up. Only some of the temporary housing managed to keep neighbors together. Other housing units are quite a mixture. This makes coffee and tea time, parties, and community events more than just a fun time. In the midst of unspeakable tragedy, not knowing your neighbors and having no friends is downright dangerous for the lonely. 

Efforts to help the evacuees tend to concentrate on the larger housing units. The "dark spots" with very little aid are the smaller places with less than 20 households. 

And where are the people who are living with relatives? Or the people in rented apartments? Where are the unemployed 50-somethings, who are still the breadwinners, may or may not have their house and their family, and whose workplace got swept away by the tsunami?

Where are they? Nobody seems to know. 

Some relief organizations are working on the big picture, and doing a great job of it. There's plenty of room for relief work that targets helping with the smaller picture, and filling in for what the bigger organizations can't cover. 

And there's always a need for loving individual people around you. No disaster required for that. 

How do we take these needs and turn them into action? I don't really know. 

But we're heading back to Morioka now to make some preparations for what we do know about next week. Including baking cookies to munch on during conversations. Life stuff. 

Impossible We

Who is this team in Ofunato? 

We're connected to the United Project, the relief work branch of International Bible Fellowship, made up of some churches in the Tokyo and Chiba area. 

We're working under the 3.11 Iwate Church Network, a relief work network of local Protestant churches in Iwate Prefecture, predominantly Baptist. 

I'm sent in by Pearl Vineyard, a church in Yokohama, with the backing of the Vineyard church in Seattle, Washington, plus the prayer backup of the Vineyard church in Portland, Maine. And amazing blog readers who mean business. 

Which sounds impressive and all. But right now, we are three incredibly different women sleeping on the floor of a retreat center library in sleeping bags. We have a whole lot of backing and volunteer teams waiting in the wings. But this week, we're a teeny hodgepodge. 

The 3.11 Iwate Church Network has a couple of bases already in Miyako City and Taro. Our task, which we have accepted, is to set up a base here in Ofunato. The leader of our team tried setting up a location first. A house where the three of us would live, where volunteer teams could come to work. But there are no houses available that we can find. (Hence the delay that kept me in Yokohama.) So we decided to just plain start doing relief work instead. 

Paula. We call her Po. She's a tiny little powerhouse from Taiwan, very much the leader. She teaches whenever she gets a chance, organizes, peeks over the dashboard to drive, and prays up a storm. She's committed one to two years to this effort at this point. She's been in Japan for eight years, and a missionary for three years. A big person in a very small package. 

Fang Lin. Also from Taiwan, and Po-san's best friend. Medium-sized. She's on staff at a Covenant church in Taiwan, and is on a sabbatical year. She's spending the last three months of it here on this project. She encourages, takes lots and lots of pictures, and sleeps in the back seat of the car on long drives. But don't let appearances fool you. About half of what looks like sleeping back there is actually prayer. And when we're praying together, she goes for it. 

Me, Rachel, the largest, approximately two and a half Po-sans. I pray the quietest of the three, and so far, my role has apparently been to laugh at the things that should freak us out. Like the GPS deciding it would be faster to take a one-lane road straight (OK, winding in hairpin curves) over a mountain to Kesen-numa instead of the two-lane highway around it. (And by one lane, I mean about a third of an American driveway, with occasional wider spots to let opposing traffic by.) And the real estate office telling us there won't be any rentals available in town through the end of the year. And three of us taking on a whole city. 

None of us particularly mind being on tatami mats on the library floor in the retreat center, with access to a kitchen, laundry, bath, and restrooms. Free housing for  volunteer relief workers. There are two other women staying in the library too. What could be better? This way we get to start, instead of waiting for the silly ducks to line up in a row. 

Do I know how a team works? Nope. I don't have a bloomin' clue. Guess I'll find out, huh?

And language. Po-san and Fang Lin share Taiwanese and Mandarin. Fang Lin and I share advanced intermediate English. Po-san and I share advanced Japanese and middle intermediate English. Yeah. Talking is an interesting adventure in itself. Fang Lin and I are still fine-tuning how to say each other's names. She's called me everything from Leecher to Richard, and I have no idea what variety of names I've accidentally invented for her. We'll get it right one of these days. 

Ofunato has at least 1800 families in temporary housing in more than 30 places that used to be sports parks, neighborhood parks, school playgrounds, anywhere non-tsunami zone with any room at all. Some locations have over 300 families. Some have four. We've found out that the tiny places get much less help than the large ones. 

Our phone number will be in the newspaper in a few days for people to call when they need help. Oh, and Councilman Miura wants a city Christmas event. Ha! This will be verrrry interesting.