Going on a Bear Hunt

What an eventful 2 weeks. While I was off shovelling mud one of my friends (and occasional blog tech support) got engaged (congratulations Charlotte and Dave!) and another had a baby (congratulations the Bromleys!), marvelous

Sorry the moblogging stopped abruptly after 3 days, it turned out my pathetic little solar charger was NOT man enough for the job of charging my phone and so after 3 days, that was that.

Reading back what I wrote at the time; it’s not very positive sounding. I strongly suspect that has far more to do with the time of day I was writing (before 6am, bleh) than any actual unhappiness because, looking back on it, the week I spent in Tohoku was, quite simply, the best week of my life so far. It’s too hot for me up there now so I won’t be going back for a couple of months, but come October and you just try and keep me away.

Here’s the story:

We boarded the night bus at 9.30 pm for the journey to Ishinomaki in Tohoku. I was expecting a miserable time as I don’t generally sleep well on buses, but as the bus was less than half full and we each had two seats I actually managed to pass most of the journey asleep. We stopped at a services about 45 mins from the disaster zone at 5am and, as we weren’t due in Ishinomaki until 7.30, we stopped there for a couple of hours. It is the unexpected moments of closeness that cement friendships and, as I sat in a park in the early morning light with my friend Erica just chatting and whiling away the hour until the bus would be leaving again, I suspected this week was probably going to forge ours into something a bit stronger that the usual ‘ladies that lunch’.

We arrived, had a quick orientation meeting and transfered to our final destination. We were staying in a clothing factory that had been cleared by previous groups of volunteers in the middle of a badly damaged residential area. The factory was just one huge room with a tarpaulin to give the girls a bit of privacy. No such luck for the boys, and some of them seemed to relish the fact. Certainly I caught myself more than once staring vacantly into the distance, only to realise I was staring fully at some guy getting changed. Still, they had a changing room and they chose not to use it, so I shan’t feel too guilty if I occasionally elected not to look immediately away from some of the adonis-esque abs I found myself accidentally gazing at.

We had time to unroll our bedding, change into our work gear and then we were straight into it. On the first day all the new arrivals were together clearing a plot of land for a family. Our team of 7 had a garage to clear:

Before:

During:

Team 10 and friends taking a break:

Nearly finished:

That’s a lot of hedoro (sludge):

A job well done:

By everybody (4 teams and the family):

We finished fairly early as it was our first day and we hadn’t had a full night’s sleep the night before and headed back to the factory. I don’t remember much about that first evening. Food was eaten and there was probably some chatting.

It’s strange looking back at those photos to think that, at that point, I’d barely spoken to the people in them. The work had been carried out with spirit and speed and pretty much all of our conversation on that day was dedicated to figuring out how to work together. I doubt we talked much that first night: we didn’t know each other yet. At some point I must have fallen, exhausted, into bed. The bed, however, was a yoga mat on the floor, so the quality of the sleep, even as exhausted as we were, shouldn’t be overestimated.

The next morning, we were up again by 6am. Coffee and porridge with almonds and cranberries set me up well for the day and Erica supplied both. I think I may have fallen a little bit in love with her at that point.

We geared up and presented ourselves for the daily morning meeting and rajio taiso session (radio exercise):

Equipment was loaded into wheelbarrows and we were off for day 2:

As I posted at the time, day 2 was somewhat uninspiring at first, but in the afternoon we were transfered to help with clearing a garden of mud and we felt better at the end of the day than we had at lunch. Still, even as difficult as we found that first lot, we cleared a lot of detritus, and the before and after pictures show that perhaps the day 2 blues were responsible for some, if not all, of our (my) feelings of frustration, because we did good work that morning:

Before:

After:

The concrete pole is a telegraph pole that had been ripped up by it’s base. The piece lying at an angle in the first picture is the base, you can just see it lying on the rest of the pole on the left hand side of the second picture as well. The pole is nearly 2 feet thick reinforced concrete and it has been snapped like a twig. You can’t get the magnitude of the destruction from the TV, and even on the ground it is too great to be comprehensible, but perhaps this, more than a km from the shore and quite far from the worst of the destruction, can give you the smallest sense of the power involved.

The area had suffered:

After day 2 we settled into a routine. We would get up very early, usually around 5.30, have a leisurely breakfast lasting an hour or more (these became the most important part of the day for me; I really treasured the peace and the conversation), gear up, do our rajio taiso, get our jobs for the day and get stuck in. Breaks were approximately every hour and lunch was 12.30 – 13.30. We carried debris and piled it for collection and we shovelled mud and sludge into bags and piled those up by the road too. In the evenings we would perhaps visit the one open convenience store, sit around chatting over dinner, read a book or play cards. We worked hard and in the evening we enjoyed each other’s company. We weren’t without the occasional point of friction, and I think everyone snapped at someone else at some point during the week, but on the whole, we got on with getting on and we made friends.

At some point, dressed in full PPE for shovelling toxic sludge, we ended up hauling debris in the full sun outside instead. Taped into our boots, the only solution for cooling down was… well… At this point we ceased to be Team 10 and became Team Pants Off! instead. Or Team Trousers Down! in British

Towards the end, I started to feel sad that it was coming to and end. I was dying for a shower and a night in a proper bed, but I had expected the week to be one of the hardest things I had ever done, physically and mentally, and, while there were definitely moments of sadness and fear, it was far from hard and it was also fantastically good fun.

I am so very grateful to the people I met and the friends I made and especially to Erica for her fantastic company and to Aki for leading our team so well, for putting up with us and for taking and sharing these photos. I hope to keep in touch with everyone and I will definitely be doing this again.

Gambappe Tohoku!

There is a constant stream of short-stay volunteers coming and going. Their buses leave very early in the morning and they generally start packing up around 5.15. We don’t need to get up until 7 but because they are awake from 5.15, so are we. We don’t much like them.

Sunday was the hardest day so far, as we had been promised it would be, although I don’t think it’s because we were too tired. We ended up trying to dig around a foot and a half of tsunami detritus from someone’s lot in the direct sun. It was uninspiring work, because it was an empty lot and it was very slow and very difficult and we weren’t really sure how deep we needed to dig. We weren’t experienced enough to figure out how much water and how many breaks we needed and we all got headaches. In the end, it was decided there was too much for human labour to efficiently do and a digger was required. We were pleased to be transferred to a different job.

Yesterday was completely different. We were inside a house scooping mud and sludge and slop from the space under the floor. It was by far the dirtiest smelliest task we’ve done so far but, again, I really enjoyed myself. I spend so much time staring at a screen or in the lab pipetting that the opportunity to stretch my body instead of my brain is valuable. My new slim(ish)-line self is quite capable of digging for 8 hours without complaining, and that feels good too.

But yesterday was also the most emotional day we’ve had. The home owners were on site and. As is quite common, they show their gratitude with food. They supplied all the iced tea we could drink, a lavish lunch and ice cream for the afternoon break. In the even they sent sushi to our accommodation. During a break we were chatting and discovered the house was the woman’s sisters and she had died in the tsunami. The building (which was modern and large and must have been beautiful before) was one of only a few still standing in an area of utter devastation. 100 meters down the road two fire engines were sitting were they had been tumbled in amongst what has become the area dump. The house was a single story building with a high ceiling entrance, the water make was 2.5 meters up the wall of the hallway, in the rest of the building there had been nowhere to escape to. We found child’s toys in the mud. We don’t know whether they belonged to the family or had been swept in with the mud but the only thing to do was put the feelings they evoked in a tightly sealed box o deal with later and keep digging.

The noise of 100 exhausted people sleeping on a factory floor is strangely similar to a jungle at night.

I am incapable of holding on to more than one ear plug for an entire night.

Yesterday, after an overnight bus journey that, unusually for me, I managed to sleep through almost all of, we shovelled mud for 4 hours. 14 people can shift a lot of mud in 4 hours. To my surprise, steamed-up goggles aside, I really enjoyed myself.

In the evening, we giggled quite a lot. We don’t hate each other yet…

We have been told that day 2 is usually the worst as everyone always does too much the first day and they’re still very tired from the journey. This is probably true. I want coffee.

We start shovelling again in 90 mins. This time for 8 hours.

The family we helped yesterday were so pleased

I have just finished packing for my trip on Friday. I got everything in my bag, sort of. Close enough that I can manage it all anyway. Out of interest, I weighed the bags: they total 23 kg (51 lbs), which is almost exactly 1/3rd of my body weight. Ack.

It turns out volunteering requires a lot of gear. Here is a list of what I’m taking:

Food for 1 week
2L of water (for emergencies only, there should be some on site)
- these first two items account for 9 kgs of the total, so at least it will be lighter on the way back!
Dust masks (2 per day)
A set of waterproofs
Steel toe-capped wellies
a roll of tape
gas stove
gas
spoon, fork, knife, chopsticks
bowl
cup
a thermos
kairo (sticky heat pads for if it’s cold at night)
A first aid kit
clothes for 8 days (I have a fresh set for each day, which constitutes luxury, but I doubt it added more than 2 kg to the total)
toothbrush & toothpaste
ear plugs (with 50 or so people sharing a single warehouse floor, these are most definitely essential)
wet wipes
microfibre towel
head scarves (for keeping sweat out of eyes, these are not a luxury)
2 packets of oreos and 2 of chocolate (bite me)
A head torch
a jumper
sleeping bag
blanket
tool set
a solar phone charger
batteries
some money

If anyone can see anything there that I don’t actually need, that might reduce the weight a bit, please don’t be shy!

Please donate to the relief effort at peaceboat.jp.

Yesterday I attended the orientation session for my trip with Peaceboat to Ishinomaki. In the run up to the series of bank holidays that occurs at the start of May called Golden Week, Peaceboat were overrun with volunteers and were turning people away; since then, numbers have fallen away dramatically and they are struggling to find people: now is the time to go.

View Larger Map

The satellite image has been updated by Google to show the way it looks now, but drag the little man to street view and you can still see what used to be there.

I have been asked more than once lately whether things are getting back to normal, because it hasn’t been in the news lately. The answer to that is very simply no. Not even remotely. The truth is that it hasn’t been in the news lately because nothing has changed and an unchanged situation doesn’t sell copy. There are still towns that were totally obliterated and where the clean-up hasn’t even started; there are still thousands living in evacuation centres with just a small amount of rice and bread to eat; there are still busses on top of apartment blocks and ships in what were once bedrooms. Festering mud encapsulates rotting animal carcasses in peoples homes and livelihoods and lives are still destroyed. The official death toll still lies at around 15000 dead, 9000 missing.

Right now, the things most concerning me about this trip are how well I will be able to sleep, the smell, whether I will cope with the hard physical labour, how much gear I have to carry and how I will cope with not washing for 8 days.

I am fairly certain that, once I get there, those will seem trivial and irrelevant concerns.