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.