Project Report
| Jan 24, 2018
Disaster Recovery New Years Report
Thank you very much for all your continued support. You have helped us further assure people in Tohoku that they have not been forgotten as they continue to overcome daily challenges in rebuilding their lives nearly seven years after the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Recovery and rebuilding take years. There are still people living in what was originally intended to be temporary housing and there are significant housing, infrastructure, labor and other shortages in the region. In addition, with the passage of time, the number of volunteers going to and the amount of charitable donations for Tohoku continue to drop.
Autumn and early winter are very busy times for farmers in Tohoku as they must work hard to harvest their crops and then clear and prepare the fields for winter. Labor shortages continue to make it very hard for local farmers in Tohoku to run their farms and, as a result, further rebuild their lives. Many of the local farms are family run with one, two or three family members doing all the work themselves. Growing rice, vegetables, and fruit sufficient enough to earn a modest livelihood is very labor intensive and the local farmers cannot do all the work by themselves. They need the continued support of volunteers.
With your generous donations, Hands On Tokyo volunteers have been able to continue to support local farmers, Saito-san and his wife, and the New Rice Center (NRC) in Yamamoto-cho in Miyagi Prefecture. The NRC is an agricultural association of local farmers who produce and promote local rice and local produce.
In December, we took 15 volunteers — including members of a boy scout troop from The American School in Japan — to help Saito-san and his wife. The boy scouts were between 11 and 16 years old and more than half had volunteered in Tohoku with Hands On Tokyo before.
Over two days, the volunteers helped by clearing dead eggplant plants (which have large branches and deep roots) from a large field. Eggplants grow quite well in soil that was impacted by saltwater and sand during the tsunami so eggplants have become one of Saito-san’s primary crops together with paprika and leeks.
The local farmers always ask us to convey to everyone who supports our volunteer activities in Tohoku just how much they appreciate all the support. What Hands On Tokyo volunteers are able to accomplish in one or two days would take the local farmers and their families many days to complete. At the end of each day, Saito-san and his wife looked at the eggplant field with deep gratitude. They never imagined that the volunteers could do so much in two days.
With your generous support, we are continuing to organize volunteer trips to further support local farmers in Tohoku as they continue to work very hard to further rebuild their lives. We already have a volunteer trip to Tohoku planned for February during which we will help Saito-san and his wife dismantle several large greenhouses so that they can reuse the materials to build greenhouses in another area.
We also took the volunteers to an elementary school near Sendai which was an evacuation center during the tsunami and is now a museum. The children, teachers and local residents in the school survived the tsunami which tragically washed away the surrounding area. We took the volunteers there for natural disaster awareness and preparedness training. It was particularly impactful because the boy scouts have recently attended elementary school themselves. They learned the importance of acting quickly when there is a natural disaster and of always updating one’s evacuation plans.
This volunteer trip was also very impactful on the volunteers because they could see firsthand how an area devastated by a natural disaster is recovering day by day. Thank you very much for your generous support in helping make all this possible. The volunteers greatly appreciated the opportunity and are still benefiting from all that they learned and experienced. Many want to volunteer again and they have encouraged others in their boy scouts troop and in their school to volunteer in the future.
We are also continuing to organize projects in Tokyo for volunteers residing in Tokyo who want to support Tohoku but are unable to travel to Tohoku. Since our last report, we organized two projects in Tokyo so that volunteers could make Christmas wreaths and Christmas stockings for people Tohoku residents who survived the earthquake and tsunami.
Minami Soma in Fukushima Prefecture was greatly impacted by the earthquake and tsunami. The town is relatively near the nuclear power facility and the local residents were evacuated very abruptly after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami without any time to prepare or any sense of how long they would be away from their homes. In July 2016 residents were allowed to begin returning to the town. However, even now, many Minami Soma residents are still living in temporary housing. We delivered the Christmas wreaths and Christmas stockings to people still living in temporary housing in Minami Soma. It meant a lot to the temporary housing site residents to be remembered and encouraged during the holiday season.
We also delivered Christmas wreaths and Christmas stockings to senior citizens from Ogatsu in Miyagi Prefecture, who survived the earthquake and tsunami and are now living in a nursing home near Ogatsu. Ogatsu was completely devastated by the tsunami and it still will be some time before local residents will be allowed to move back to Ogatsu. Thank you very much for helping us bring a bit of Christmas Spirit to these nursing home residents.
With your generous support, we are continuing to organize volunteer projects in Tohoku and in Tokyo to further support and encourage the local residents in Minami Soma and Ogatsu.
There is still so much to be done in Tohoku and there are still many people in need of support and encouragement.
Thank you very much in advance for your continued support this year and for touching the hearts and souls of so many people in Tohoku. Slowly but steadily the road to recovery is being paved.
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