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. 

Connections

If there's anything I've learned about Northerners, it's that they're connected. And being brand-new in Ofunato, connection is what we want. 

We checked with City Hall about volunteer work, and found that it's defined as physical assistance, like cleanup, food, clothing, and shelter. The government does seem to think their task is ending soon. And they're partially right. What has been done thus far has been an incredible amount of hard work. 

There's an organization called All Hands that put a lot of work into this city, and they pulled out this week. True to their name, they put their hands to any task that was needed. There are thank-you posters all over town to recognize the contribution of these volunteers. They were here for about seven months. Yes, thank you, All Hands. 

The manual cleanup is winding down. But this disaster is far from over. Rebuilding will take time. And rebuilding hearts is a long-term task. 

For that, we need connections. 

Shortcut. Paula, our team leader, knows a city councilman who is a Christian. He is concerned about his community, and has considerable influence. He understands that his city needs heart care, and he showed us around for the afternoon. 

We went to the central office that coordinates all of the local temporary housing locations, without an appointment, and got connected to the office manager. He in turn connected us to several temporary housing locations, and we delivered rice to nine families. Then we rushed off to an appointment to be interviewed at the newspaper office for an article, because the city councilman wanted to make sure that evacuees living with relatives found out about us and could contact us with whatever needs they might have. 

But the best connection of the day is with one of the families we met. The lady of the house wants us to come visit and have some tea. 

Thank you, Councilman Miura. We'll go have tea and make a new friend as soon as we can. 

Carpenters?

Any carpenters out there? There's plenty to do with Samaritan's Purse in Kesen-numa, one of the devastated cities. The areas by the shoreline and along the river are stark reminders of what happened here. A large ship, fully intact, has settled onto the ground. It looks perfectly serviceable, but the price to move it is exorbitantly high. So there it sits among the bare foundations.

The destruction takes forever to end. We turned a corner and the buildings resumed. We headed into the business district, and store after store was just a shell. Only several blocks later did we see intact businesses. 

This city is one of the places where Samaritan's Purse is helping with the rebuilding process. We stopped by to help for the afternoon, and helped remove drywall from the first floor of a house. Once the floor, drywall, and ceiling are removed, the carpenters install a basic floor and new drywall for free. 

All finishing work is done by local Japanese carpenters at the going rate. Samaritan's Purse wants to help, not hinder the local economy. 

One of the staff told me that within an hour of here, there is a community where houses sitting ON TOP OF a 20-meter cliff (60 feet high) got damaged by the tsunami. Houses at the base of the cliff are simply gone. 

The city next to Kesen-numa, Rikuzen-Takata, is blank. Just nothing left. A few shells of buildings here and there. It was already dark when we drove through. I caught myself being thankful for the limited visibility. But I'll eventually have to see it in the daytime. 

We met a lady today who lost her childhood home that was in Rikuzen-Takata. She's far from alone in that experience. 

We've settled in at a volunteer center in Ofunato, where we'll stay for the next few days. Tomorrow, we start learning what we can about this city. 

Ofunato

Turn us loose in downtown Morioka for half an hour. One of us buys diaries and a pen. Another buys a delicate pink rose. Another traipses all over the Morioka castle ruins memorial park, delights in a stairway that was surely used by archers and other warriors, and chats with a photo-journalist for awhile, then runs out of time and returns to our meeting place at a dead run. (Yeah, guess who.)

The photo-journalist has friends and family on the coast, and is amazed that man-made structures and man-planted pine groves are gone, but fragile-looking rock formations, naturally growing trees, and land formations are intact.

He's right. It may not apply everywhere, but by comparison, nature looks unscathed.

He also told me about the town of Taro. I had already heard that it's nearly wiped out, and had a very tall sea wall. He told me it was a double wall, and the tsunami broke them both. And that chunks of that sea wall had made the nearby sea impassable for ships and boats. Work is underway to remove the pieces.

Diary, Rose, and Park-Traipser. We three headed to Ofunato City today. Part of the city looks fine. A burger joint has a sign apologizing for their limited menu. Ingredients are harder to secure these days. Tunnels have only a third of the lights on, to conserve electricity. That's all you see.

The coastline brought fresh tears. Blank expanses. Destroyed industrial parks. The city government, thank God, was on higher ground. Residences, businesses, and industry took a severe hit. A major road is flooded out. We pulled into a lot beside a towering pile of debris to turn around. Eight months after the disaster and there's still a stench.

We went up to the Catholic church on the hill to look out over the city and pray. Behind the church is a Catholic kindergarten, blissfully untouched. One of the teachers told us that all of the children and their parents made it. How I needed that piece of good news.

We asked about the history of the city, and she suggested a church member in her 80s who is "a living encyclopedia." Her house was destroyed by the tsunami, and she donated the destroyed property to use for building a volunteer center. It opens in December.

A history knower *and* history maker. I like this lady already and I haven't even met her.

There's temporary housing here and there in the undamaged part of town, if you know where to look. There are also people living in their own houses but without jobs and with extra relatives taking refuge. They need some help too.

We asked a city councilman what people need. He said rice and fresh groceries. We'll be back next week with that, plus conversation and friendship.

Back to Morioka for now.

Eight months

It's eight months tomorrow since the quake and tsunami struck. And bodies are still being found. Unfortunately, sometimes by family members instead of by government workers. The grief must be unimaginable, yet the closure of finding their loved one is important for their healing.

Iwaki, where I spent the summer, has seen its population increase by 20,000 people. Another 10,000 are expected. In the aftermath of the disaster, they're facing an unlikely problem: gambling and the unrest that comes with it. While the local tsunami victims already got their one-time payment from the government, the nuclear evacuees are receiving continual monthly payments for each member of the household. They have shopping money and gambling money, and a mentality that they're in a holding pattern (translation: spending pattern) until their towns are reopened. There's tension between the local tsunami victims and who they see as rich and lazy imports. Fights break out.

It's not all bad news. Scotch-tape granny will have her eyelid operation soon. A gentle friend is settled into her new apartment with her whole family living together again, and is studying the Bible with quite an appetite. Pastor Mori remains busy but his passion remains strong for long-term work in his changing city. Several of the most gung-ho volunteers I've ever met have outright moved to Iwaki. It's far from peachy, but hearts are mending and even thriving.

I'm on the bullet train heading to Morioka City. It's inland, and quite a drive from the coast. But that hasn't stopped Pastor Kondo from getting involved and staying involved with relief work in the area. I'm heading to his church to join other volunteers.

That's all I know for sure. Well, and that the need is huge along the coast. My task is simple: love the person in front of me. And watch for signs that Life is still winning, despite the fatigue and the length of time that has passed.

Glad you're along.

Half-stories

What, may I ask, am I being prepared for? It’s been a whirlwind month, with a recurring theme: Change Of Plans. Maybes. Almosts. Not this but that. The destination changed several times. The timing changed every few days, it seems.

I’m bad at relaying maybes. I want definites. Half-stories are really hard for me to tell.

“I’m going here on this date. Woops, no I’m not. How about here? Oh. Well then.”

Come to think of it, this entire disaster is riddled with half-stories. There might be a nuclear meltdown in the disabled nuclear plant. Sort of. It might be fine, or it might get worse. Maybe the people in the temporary housing will find local jobs, set up farms again, or start fishing again. Maybe they’ll move away. Maybe the crops near the plant are fine. Maybe not. Maybe the tsunami really did permanently cripple cities like Rikuzen-Takata, never to be rebuilt. Maybe it will make a comeback. Oh please come back. Don’t stop now. 

My giggles gave way to impatient tears after a while, and I got a severe case of are-we-there-yet, complete with the accompanying drama. Or maybe it was just that I so wanted to be North and doing something, and felt stuck in Yokohama. Probably both. (Silly girl, doing isn’t everything.) There have been several maybe-here, maybe-now, maybe-theres that I almost mentioned. I thought I knew the city and the timeframe, at least. I didn’t. And the calendar has got to be kidding me. All of that in only two weeks? How did the time creep by so slowly?

Finally, though, one of the maybes has become a definite. I’m heading North tomorrow, to Morioka City. The four suitcases and one sleeping bag were shipped there today, and I’ll catch up with the luggage tomorrow evening by bullet train.

How many half-stories will I encounter there, and how do I tell them?

What am I walking into?

No clue. Maybe it’s better that way.

Besides. Papa’s a much better driver than me. So what if He has a few surprises along the way? 

(Remind me I said that the next time I freak out.)

Hurry up and wait

Pastor Ito and his wife looked at me funny, which made me giggle even harder. Sorry, guys. I suppose it doesn't make much sense to respond this way...

They had just given me the news that the housing plans fell through. All available housing needs to go to the evacuees first. There is no house to go to in Ofunato right now. And I found it extremely funny. 

On Saturday, they initially blamed my mirth on jetlag. But it was still funny on Sunday. I thought I knew my next few steps at least. But now I don't know any. 

I've been know to get giggly when led and twirled. Ya just can't take me anywhere. 

Sunday afternoon, we met with Pastor Kondo, who was instrumental in getting me here. He is a very Life-filled, determined man who has worked with compassion in the disaster zone from the very beginning. He says this is just a delay, and asked that I stay in Yokohama while they work on finding a place for us to live. Maybe a town or two away from Ofunato. He'll let me know when there's a place to go.  

Maybe I had other things to think about just after the last two trans-Pacific flights and didn't notice the jetlag much. I'm having more trouble with it this time. Hungry and sleepy at all the wrong times. 

So the extra time is coming in handy for being a bump on a log for a while.  Guess I'll be rested and ready. 

What's next?

Oh dear, I'm giggling again.