Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Volunteering at Kugunarihama, Miyagi Prefecture (十八成浜、宮城県)

Last weekend, I volunteered with the Aichi Volunteer Center in the Tohoku region for one day.  We left Nagoya for a 13 hour night bus ride to a small village in Miyagi prefecture named Kugunarihama.

Backward sign pointing towards the ocean

The place we went to is a poor village known best for whaling.  It's basically going extinct - most of the people I saw there were the elderly.

Our group of 80 people were split into three groups: one group focused on clean up, another made bento (lunchboxes) for around 100 people, and the last group which I was in went to each house in the area to invite them for lunch and pass out a weekly newsletter.  We also record how many people wanted lunch, and if it was too cold for them to go out, we would deliver their lunch for them.

New tori being built

While we were there, we also had a rare chance to see a new tori (鳥居) being built / made.  This was the event that we were advertising to the locals to come to, because it was also where we were going to have lunch at.

Picnic in front of the new tori

Looking firsthand what that area looks like now was a really good experience.  For the most part it was all cleaned up.  There were only broken cups or bowls, or other small things mixed in with the dirt.  What stood out was the lack of houses, when you could clearly see the plots of land that separated the homes that used to be there.  That was a humbling experience - to think that in just less than a day a whole home was washed away.

Ship stuck on a parking lot

Debri scattered all over parking lot
Later in the afternoon we also got to visit some of the wreckage that was still there in another place called Ayukawa (鮎川) (like a huge liner and other broken boats that was washed onto shore).  There, we did another type of volunteering - souvenir shopping.  According to one of the volunteer leaders, he told us that the main problem is real estate and the lack of jobs.  The people in that area cannot afford to build a new house, so the government pays for their land.  Furthermore, the work for volunteers are drying up because now many people want to have the locals have those jobs, since their jobs also were washed away by the tsunami.  Economically, they will have a hard struggle in front of them.

For volunteers, they warned us to not come up randomly.  There's just not much for volunteers to do.  Instead, they recommend going with a huge organization that's already involved with volunteering over there (like the org. I went with).  These org. usually have already developed relationships with the people in the area.

In May, my friend and I hope to go once more before I leave, so I'm hoping we can!

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