Rikuzentakata - Guest Blog Entry

Blogger's Note: In an effort to capture as many perspectives of the experience as possible I have asked friends and colleagues from the trip to offer a narrative of their own experience.  While I might have pared down the narrative a bit in places, what you read next are the words, the thoughts, the memories of others who I worked with, rode with, sang with, side by side.  My personal thanks to those who took the time to share.  Sean

THE FOLLOWING ARE THE WORDS AND THOUGHTS OF MR. JOHN BAUMGARDNER:

We were going to Kesennuma. I was originally scheduled to work in Kessenuma, but switched to the second group which was going to be at a school in another town.  I had switched because I was trying to deliver some letters written by kids in the Elementary portion of our Japanese Immersion Program to kids who were still in shelters.  I am very glad I switched as the experiences I had with them would have a huge impact on me.

After dropping off the first group in Kessenuma (がんばって！), we continued on to the town of Rikuzentakata.   We left Kesennuma and continued to see the same kind of damage we had seen earlier that day and the day before.  After winding through the beautiful scenery of this area, the road dropped back down onto the coastal area and things started to feel different.  All my colleagues could feel that something was different because the bus got steadily quieter and slowly I began to realize that it was because the devastation here was complete. 

There was nothing left.  You could see the roads and where the neighborhoods were, but there were no buildings at all, just debris or in many places just emptiness.  As we wound our way through what was once Rikuzentakata (population 25,000) we took in the view - a beautiful bay surrounded by sheer devastation.  We drove mile after mile without seeing a single building.  During the quiet bus ride we noticed a lone tall pine tree where once a famous forest of 70,000 pine trees once stood - and the one surviving tree was in danger from the salinity of the salt water from the tsunami. 

We arrived at a Junior High School where our moods picked up.  Some of the town had indeed survived on a small hill that overlooked the bay.  As the bus pulled in, there were adults lined up for what we learned was “free shopping”.  A clothing company (we think it was Uniclo) had donated lots of clothes and people could come and select what they wanted.  While we waited for Peace Winds to arrive, Koh and I started walking around.  We would go up to people who were living there at the shelter and temporary housing units and Koh (日本人) would introduce us and start talking to them.  I don’t know much but simply by watching the interaction I could understand what was going on.  The caring and compassion that we shared seemed to make a small, but very real, difference in their difficult lives.  We would go from person to person and talk with them and then she would let me know what gifts I should pull from my backpack to give to them.  I reflected back on the briefing we had received at our reception with the US Ambassador, that we may think our job here was to clean or to hand out stuff at shelters, but our real job was to listen to the people if the opportunity came up. In this moment I felt so very privileged to be a part of all this and especially to be a witness to and a small part of such touching exchanges between people.

After a while it was the kids’ turn for “free shopping” and we watched as they selected new clothes to wear.  The Principal of the school came out as well and Koh talked to him and introduced us.  I presented to him some letters from our kids and a book on Oregon.  The kids quickly started passing the book around and looking through it.  After a nice chat, the Peace Winds people arrived and we started to finally get to work and the task we had come to do.

On some flat land at the Junior High a joint project between Mercy Corps and Peace Winds had built almost 100 temporary housing units and were busy building about 75 more.  There were about 20 or so that were already fully furnished and people had already moved into them.  Our job was to finish the process of furnishing the rest of the units so that more people could move in soon.  We worked very quickly giving each unit the correct number of futons, sets of sheets, sets of dishes, etc.  When we got to the last set of units, they were next to the ones where people had already moved into.  While loading up the last few units I noticed a lady waving to me from the window of one of the units where people had already moved into.  She was one of the people that Koh and I had met earlier and talked to and given gifts to.  I remembered she had told us that she had 3 grandkids and I had given her stuff for them including a letter from the kids in our program.  I waved back to her and then she started talking to me in a very excited manner.  Koh explained that she was so happy because she had just got news from her daughter that she and her family were moving into one of the units we had just furnished that very night.  She was so glad that her family was getting this opportunity and so grateful to us for helping to make it happen.

We finished preparing 83 units that day so that 232 people could move in.  That was a nice accomplishment by our team, but could not come even close to the feeling that we had also touched several hearts that day and seeing it in their faces.

The ride back through the devastated town was very different for me.  As I looked at the massive cleanup operation continuing to go on there I thought about a new phrase I had learned on the trip, “shikata ga nai”, which roughly means ‘nothing can be done’ or as I like to say, ‘it is what it is’.  We couldn’t do anything about the devastation that had happened, but we could certainly do something about the recovery that was very clearly going on.

--John Baumgardner