INJM journal day 1
(I have decided I am going to at least make an attempt to journal about this, let's see how it goes.)
So I got back from my first day of volunteering about an hour ago and am currently sitting in the It's Not Just Mud house waiting for dinner time.
I arrived this morning very sleep deprived due to catching the bus from Shinjuku at midnight last night, arriving at 6:30am and not sleeping a wink in between because my seat was right up the back over the rear wheel and engine, meaning wherever I rested my head it was vibrating violently and whenever we went over a bump I was bounced in the air. Oddly enough, I was actually pretty fine for most of the day, except for the car ride back from volunteering, during which I was out like someone had flicked a switch.
The volunteer group was split today, my half of the group traveling to a town called Funakoshi to help the local people with their business ventures. There, we were spilt up further into three groups. I was asked if I could paint, I said I could draw, and apparently that was good enough. So I was assigned to work with about half a dozen others indoors seated around a kotatsu. The three jobs turned out to be one group working with the men processing seaweed, and the other two helping the local women with their project. The non-artists in the group were breaking salvaged pieces of slate roof tiles into small pieces and sanding them, while those who had been assigned to painting were instructed to decorate them however they wished. The finished pieces are going to be sold as cell phone charm type trinkets.
The first batch of ten.
The charms are mostly only a couple of centimeters across, making them rather fiddly to paint in detail.
To be honest, I both enjoyed the work, and felt like I was somehow "cheating" by doing such cushy, fun work in a disaster zone.
Funakoshi village
We had been given an overview of the area on the drive up, along with explanations and stories from one of the other volunteers, a US citizen who spent her childhood in Japan, and came back six weeks after the earthquake working with Doctors Without Borders, and has been in Ishinomaki ever since. We drove through the remains of Onagawa village, the majority of which has been completely obliterated except for the rows of square foundations, past places where the suction of the tsunami's retreat had formed gullies and tunnels, rendering the ground too unstable to build on ever again. The wreckage is gone, and what remains appears bleached, sanded and scoured. Our work for the day was in an abandoned school building, on a slight hill near the waterfront. From the outside, the first two floors were smashed and broken.
The elementary school in Funakoshi
We sat on the third floor, overlooking the ocean far below the window. I noticed early in my shift that the clock suspended from a ceiling beam was stopped, and didn't think much of it at the time. After lunch I went down to the portable toilet on the ground floor, since the building had no running water, and noticed identical clocks on those floors, also stuck- the first floor slightly before the second floor, the second floor slightly before the third. They started from a little after 3:30pm. Each was still frozen in the moment of time the water had reached the ceiling of the floor it was on.
Taped to the wall between the second and third floor were muddied and faded cherry blossoms of colored paper- a classroom activity from a day early in March.
So I got back from my first day of volunteering about an hour ago and am currently sitting in the It's Not Just Mud house waiting for dinner time.
I arrived this morning very sleep deprived due to catching the bus from Shinjuku at midnight last night, arriving at 6:30am and not sleeping a wink in between because my seat was right up the back over the rear wheel and engine, meaning wherever I rested my head it was vibrating violently and whenever we went over a bump I was bounced in the air. Oddly enough, I was actually pretty fine for most of the day, except for the car ride back from volunteering, during which I was out like someone had flicked a switch.
The volunteer group was split today, my half of the group traveling to a town called Funakoshi to help the local people with their business ventures. There, we were spilt up further into three groups. I was asked if I could paint, I said I could draw, and apparently that was good enough. So I was assigned to work with about half a dozen others indoors seated around a kotatsu. The three jobs turned out to be one group working with the men processing seaweed, and the other two helping the local women with their project. The non-artists in the group were breaking salvaged pieces of slate roof tiles into small pieces and sanding them, while those who had been assigned to painting were instructed to decorate them however they wished. The finished pieces are going to be sold as cell phone charm type trinkets.
The first batch of ten.
The charms are mostly only a couple of centimeters across, making them rather fiddly to paint in detail.
To be honest, I both enjoyed the work, and felt like I was somehow "cheating" by doing such cushy, fun work in a disaster zone.
Funakoshi village
We had been given an overview of the area on the drive up, along with explanations and stories from one of the other volunteers, a US citizen who spent her childhood in Japan, and came back six weeks after the earthquake working with Doctors Without Borders, and has been in Ishinomaki ever since. We drove through the remains of Onagawa village, the majority of which has been completely obliterated except for the rows of square foundations, past places where the suction of the tsunami's retreat had formed gullies and tunnels, rendering the ground too unstable to build on ever again. The wreckage is gone, and what remains appears bleached, sanded and scoured. Our work for the day was in an abandoned school building, on a slight hill near the waterfront. From the outside, the first two floors were smashed and broken.
The elementary school in Funakoshi
We sat on the third floor, overlooking the ocean far below the window. I noticed early in my shift that the clock suspended from a ceiling beam was stopped, and didn't think much of it at the time. After lunch I went down to the portable toilet on the ground floor, since the building had no running water, and noticed identical clocks on those floors, also stuck- the first floor slightly before the second floor, the second floor slightly before the third. They started from a little after 3:30pm. Each was still frozen in the moment of time the water had reached the ceiling of the floor it was on.
Taped to the wall between the second and third floor were muddied and faded cherry blossoms of colored paper- a classroom activity from a day early in March.