Iwate Disaster Relief Plan

While in Japan, we are planning to volunteer our time to help with areas affected by the tsunami and earthquake. We will be in the northern prefecture of Iwate.

Here is our itinerary:

 9/23/11:  Arrive in Hanamaki for an initial meeting with the Hanamaki Homestay
Association in the late afternoon.  We will meet up with the other three members
of our trip. For dinner, we travel up to Morioka and then to the Iwatezan Seishonen no Ie, where we will meet Kumamoto sensei, Ogawa sensei, and 22 students from Iwate Kenritusu Tanki Daigaku
for a meeting to prepare us for the volunteer project the next day.  We will
spend the night here.

9/24/11:  Travel by bus with our Iwate Kenritsu students to Otsuchi.  Here we will be
Based at a kindergarten (Osanago Yochien), but will be participating in a cleanup project
that will already be in progress.  Iwate Kenritsu will supply the gloves, a mask, and clean-up
tools. Here we will participate in a river cleaning project and visit Osanago
Yochien again at the end.  All this will take us to about 4pm.  Then we board the bus again,
this time for Hanamaki.  We will stay at the Folukuloro in Towa-cho for an onsen inn, to meet with
the Hanamaki Homestay Association and the newly formed Towa Ohio University Yuko-kai (Friendship Association).

9/25/11:  We will tour a famous local shrine/temple compound and see the famous Bishomonten Ritzuzo (Boddhisatva, Guardian Of the North), go apple picking, and eat lunch before board the Shinkansen again in the early afternoon.

I will be working with my close friends at the kindergarten which I was told has quite a story. My sensei explained this to me:

To give you a little more background, the kindergarten building was damaged

in the tsunami and then caught on fire, so there will be plenty of
devastation to see right there.  The teachers took the one and two year old
children to a neighboring hill to get away from the water, narrowly escaping
with their lives.  We are going to be buying and sending (maybe even
carrying in) some English language books.  The director has a program where
volunteers from the neighborhood read English books to one and two year olds
to jump start there English. Staying here will not be a benign assignment.
Normally, they aren't open on Saturdays (9/24), but since we are coming,
they are having a "regular day."  However, they want only at the most, five
of us here.

I am very excited to be participating in this assignment. I really had my doubts that I would be able to lift heavy things out in the field or do well in the heat, so I'm glad that I have a chance to be inside and interacting with people like I wanted to. I know it will still be exhausting, but I'm thinking this will be a very good trip. We get to meet a lot of new people and establish a friendship with this part of Japan that we had no official ties with before. 

Now that I am ten days away from leaving, I am becoming more and more excited!

(And nervous.)

I suppose it's time to hit the books!

L