Tohoku Volunteering

Tohoku Volunteering

Tohoku-Minamisanriku Prefecture

Overview

Day One – 05.05.2015

Sites visiting

Work in the community center that has been built.

Night reunion.

Day Two – 06.06.2015

Work in the community center

Lunch

Back to Tokyo

An extremely strong earthquake has affected Japan in March of 2011. Thousands of people have lost their homes, families, jobs and lives. The area affected is called Tohoku that still, 4 years later, trying to rebuild and reestablish its community, and normal daily life. The earthquake has caused a huge tsunami that destroyed approximately 98% of Minamisanriku Prefecture.

As a group of volunteers, we want to help them rebuilding their lives in this area and bring hope, in some sense, to this community. For the second time, Habitat For Humanity Sophia Campus Chapter has volunteered in the Tohoku area, which has been highly destroyed by the 03.11 big natural disaster. Our group left Tokyo on Monday night (04/04/2015) and arrived at this prefecture on Tuesday early morning. We could spend only two days volunteering there this time, but we worked very hard doing our best on these days.

Immediately after arrived in the local, we had a breakfast in a convenience store and started our journey. We went to some remaining buildings devastated by the Tsunami. All this places have their own history. For example this image on the right side is where the prefecture used to be. During the Tsunami one local woman stayed there warning people that the tsunami was coming and they should protect themselves going to safe places. Even though she knew that she would die if she stayed there warning the other people, she stayed and saved a lot of people by doing that. However, unfortunately she lost her life when the tsunami reached the building.

After four years, the area still needs a lot of work to be as it was before the disaster. The entire prefecture has been rebuilt for this time, but it seems to completely recover it will take a long time. Locals are still living in very small temporary houses, 8sq. meters for two persons. According to locals, another big issue is that they are no longer getting together as a community. The people and non-profit organizations have been tackling all problems and trying to improve the situation. Our role this time, was to help on the construction of a community center for these people.

Working as a group at the community center construction was a very good experience. The spirit of collaboration was unique in all of us. The members of the community were very grateful, always very happy that we were there and bringing some traditional local food to us as a sign of gratitude. After one day and a half of work we had a special and delicious lunch with seafood barbecue. The curiosity is that local people fished all the seafood we ate in the same day. We all talked a lot about this experience during the 8 hours trip back to Tokyo. Also, we agreed that we wanted to do more, but unfortunately time was limited.

Finally, I would like to let you with one thought, since we live

in society and we are very fortunate comparing to many needed people, what is the role you want to play during your life to make society better? How is the world you wish your children, grandchildren and next generations will live? And what are you doing for it? It is never late to start creating some positive impact on society. This is easy, we can star from a small action and there is no limit of what we can achieve by collaborating and thinking a little bit more about others.