Category: Latest Posts

Summer blankets delivery

People may think that, at evacuation centers they already got enough supply for their temporal life, and they don’t need any thing anymore.

The answer is No.

Imagine when tsunami hit beautiful Tohoku land, people had to evacuate without carrying anything with them from their house , and it was chilling winter. Soon they have received winter supplies; like sweaters, down jackets, winter blankets, and winter socks.

And now humid and hot summer is arriving at Ishinomaki. And they don’t have any summer supply. They evacuated to Minato elementary school with their hands free. None of them could bring personal belongings out from house.

We heard the needs of 300 summer blankets, and thanks to generous friends and colleagues, we could deliver to them on 22/May.

Your financial support will be delivered directly to people at Ishinomaki by Nadia.

Please keep supporting people at Ishinomaki.

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We need your hands

During Golden week, you might have heard through TV that there were too many volunteers at Tohoku, and they didn’t get enough work to do.

I imagine lots of people might have wanted to join volunteer activity but  many hasitated, because they didn’t want to be nuisance.

Is it true that we have enough volunteers? The answer is NO. At least where we are working, at Ishinomaki area, there are so many houses to clean, and the number of needs are increasing.

On 8, may, the last day of golden week, we could only form one team, but all veterans. We were supposed to clean a store house and an office floor in the morning and a house in the afternoon.

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Our task seemed to be difficult for small number of volunteers, but fortunately, 4 professional construction workers offered to join our team, and we completed cleaning in 4 hours! As soon as we finished, we hurried to next house to clean.

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Before you hesitate, contact us. We always need your hands.

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Two month have passed since eathquake

Dear all,

Two months ago at noon. Who could have imagined the scenes we can still see in Ishinomaki today? None of our NADIA members did, and none of us intended to have to take concrete actions. Nonetheless, we all somehow got shocked by the situation and decided to try to help and support them.

Two months have past. TV programmes are not broadcasting tsunami topics as often as before, but this doesn’t mean people there are not suffering anymore. Still many houses are left damaged, many people are still living in schelters.

Many clocks at Ishinomaki still points at 3:50p.m., the time tsunami hit the city. They lost many loving family/friends, houses and precious remories, which may not be returned to them. But we ‘d like to believe they don’t loose their hope and dream if we keep giving our hands and support.

Today, 2 months after the tragedy, please save 10 minutes of your time to think what you can do for them, and let’s pray for them together.

And most importantly, let’s go and give your actual hands to them.

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NADIA in the press!

by Frank Zeller – Mon May 9, 8:42 am ET

ISHINOMAKI, Japan (AFP) – It oozes and reeks and sometimes it shimmers in oily rainbow colours. Millions of tonnes of putrid mud now fill every nook and cranny of Japan’s tsunami disaster zone.

Volunteers who have spent weekends shovelling it out of survivors’ half-wrecked homes have developed an intimate relationship with the muck that soils their overalls, gloves and workboots.

“It looks like layered chocolate cake, but it smells like a mix of saltwater and oil,” said Masato Arima, 35, a Tokyo project manager with a financial services firm, wearing a yellow hardhat and industrial facemask.

Joji Hiratsuka, another volunteer working in the devastated port town of Ishinomaki with aid group Nadia, has a different take on the stuff.

“It’s like rancid Jell-O. It’s black. You can’t describe the smell — oil, dead fish, everything. There’s petroleum from cars, boats and oil tanks. It’s not organic. It’s like the ocean, but in a bad way.”

Ishinomaki is littered with dramatic evidence of the March 11 quake and the monster wave it spawned that erased entire neighbourhoods here and left almost 25,000 people dead or missing along the shattered Pacific coast.

Cars now stick out at odd angles from a graveyard, watched over silently by stone Buddhas. Fishing boats lie scattered amid broken houses. And a Statue of Liberty figure towers oddly over a debris-strewn river island.

But while bulldozers and cranes will eventually remove the large-scale wreckage of Japan’s epic catastrophe, clearing the mud from thousands of homes is a job that must be done by hand, one scoop at a time.

“Someone has to do it,” said Christine Lavoie-Gagnon, whose volunteer group Nadia (a name that means “Hope”) took more than 100 people by bus to the town in the just-ended “Golden Week” of public holidays.

“People here have had the shock of their lives, something that only happens once every 1,000 years,” she said. “They’re left with their sorrow and fatigue — and lots of mud in their houses.

“Money is good, but they also need hands. Three of us came in the beginning, and now there are lots of us. We have people from Asia, Europe and the Americas. Hands don’t have nationalities.

“We come back so people don’t feel alone with their mud. We do whatever they ask us to do.”

The gritty labour has made the volunteers appreciate their day jobs — many of them are traders, brokers and staff at major global financial institutions. Yet most of them have kept coming back for more.

“The insides of these houses look like they went through a mixer,” said Hiratsuka, 49, a Canadian derivatives trader and ice hockey player dubbed “the human bulldozer” by his team-mates.

“We come and help people clean out their houses. They may not even be able to live there again, but it gives them breathing space. An elderly couple can’t dig through a tonne of dirt. They need help.”

There are better and worse days.

“One day we found about 20 kilograms (45 pounds) of chicken buried in the mud. It had been there for about three weeks, it was fermented and slimy,” Hiratsuka said, clearly not relishing the memory.

The more rewarding finds are families’ mementos and keepsakes — photographs, religious icons, urns with relatives’ ashes — that volunteers sometimes find in the mud, clean up and return to the families.

The job is not just about muscle power, but also emotional support.

Mother-of-two Yukako Ishikawa was so moved by the group’s help in her half-destroyed childhood home that she likened the motley crew of workers in outdoor wear and hazmat suits to a flock of deities.

“When I was alone here, I felt so much fear,” said Ishikawa, 36, who survived the tsunami when she took her young children and elderly parents to a nearby elementary school building with only minutes to spare.

Her family shuddered for days in the darkness and cold, waiting for help. Desperate for food, Ishikawa waded back through waist-deep water to salvage drink bottles, cans and plastic-sealed food from the flooded kitchen.

As the muddy waters receded, she returned to the two-storey house, the detritus of their former lives now a jumbled and soggy mess, wondering if and when she could start to reclaim her life.

“I was alone here in a house full of mud,” she said, as volunteers around her filled wheelbarrows and sandbags with black earth, cleaned hand-carved window frames and restored a small Japanese garden.

“They helped me through the hard time. Now I feel I can move forward.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110509/wl_asia_afp/japandisasteraccidentnuclearaidmud

Story of Nadia

Everything started with one mail from Christine who had just returned from the Tohoku region on her media report job immediately after earthquake. She sent a mail to several friends, and talked about the disastrous scene of the stricken area.

“It’s not productive to be in grief in front of television. The people in refuge centers are suffering from shortage of necessary goods, and their house is heavily damaged, they need immediate help. It’s also important to raise donation fund staying in Tokyo, but they need our actual hands to give them support. Let’s go to support as soon as possible, making sure to bring our food and drink, and secure our accommodation.”

Soon two friends raised their hands up, and departed Tokyo on 24/March. We started our activity at Tagajo-city, which is 15 kilometers away from Sendai. It’s only 12 days after earthquake, and there were still aftershock continuously, infrastructure like gas wasn’t back yet even big city like Sendai. Not a hotel was open regularly. The only place which accepted us is a hotel so called “Love Hotel”, and because of that hotel our activity became possible.

Three women in a Love-Hotel room, our stay was far more comfortable than we expected. In a room we had everything we needed except for hot shower. There was a microwave oven, water boiler, massage chair, a king sized bed, fridge, air-conditioner, playstation, karaoke, movie projector, even romantic room lighting! Although we hardly used any of those fancy  facility, considering the fact that many houses  and refuge centers were enduring black-out, we appreciate “Hotel Bonita” so much.

As we continue our activity at Tagajo city, cleaning their houses, moving out their furniture, helping reception in city hall, checking relief supply, we understood what is needed at stricken area.

When weekend came, three more friends joined us with car-full relief supply, and continued volunteer activity at Tagajo. We realized, more volunteer numbers we have, more efficient our activity became.
After work, back to Bonita hotel, we talked about future volunteer plan through night, with foods and wines we brought from Tokyo.

We went back to Tokyo once to prepare for next bigger scaled plan, and soon we came back to Miyagi. And since then, we visit Miyagi every weekend.

As we continue our activity at Tagajo city, we realized there were many more heavily damaged area, and people there need desperately our help. We set our activity point at Ishinomaki city, where houses were still remained untouched 3 weeks after tsunami.

At first we brought relief supply and our own gears from Tokyo, but as they started recovering from damage, we saw shops and restaurants were restarting their business. When we made sure they had enough supply, we decided to get relief goods and necessary gears from local shops, and try to buy stuff from them, this is because we aim to encourage their local business.
We order our lunch at local shop and they deliver them to us. And also, instead of camping, we enjoy staying at local Ryokan, which is still not perfectly in operation, but restarted their business trying to recover as soon as possible. On top of that, enjoying their open-air hot spring after full day work is totally priceless!!
By this way, we believe that Nadia can also support local business and employment, and it will be an investment for future development.

Everything started from one mail which was sent from the person eye witnessed the scene.

If you think you are helpless in front of natural disaster, join us once, and tell your friends what you saw.

You can change the world…

Golden week with Nadia

In Japan, instead of Easter holiday, we are in the middle of holiday season, called “Golden Week”, which started from 29th/April.

Japanese are well known as hard workers at office, and for us, GW is the time to relax and recharge our energy. Some spends time with family, some goes overseas, some goes in a mountain to enjoy fresh early summer air.

Here is a story of people who decided to spend their holiday with Naida, with people at Ishinomaki. Our trip schedule was rather hard, spending night in a bus after hardworking week.

28/April(Thu)

23:00 Shinjuku

Most of us worked until evening, went home, took quick shower, grabbed boots and helmet and masks, and hurried to the meeting point. We were a group of multi-nationality, but working in Japan, we are used to be punctual, all gathered on time!

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Team-Nadia, here we go!

29/April(Fri)

8:30 Ishinomaki

Again, we arrived at Ishinomaki on time, unload our baggages, and changed to working out fit. A bit nervous and shocked to see the reality. Some lost his words, some tried to hide their upset.

After briefing, each group went to houses where they were assigned. Each group were well mixed with female/male, veterans/un-experienced, JPN speakers/ENG speakers. 50 days after Tsunami, many houses still remained untouched. Most of us couldn’t sleep well in a bus, but no one complained seeing how people enduring under this situation.

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Sakura survived tsunami and welcomed us at their garden.

15:00~15:30 Finish work

Some group completed cleaning, and some promised to come back next day, depending on house condition.

When we met house owner in the morning, they were a little shy so as we were, but at the end of the day, all of us became like family, promised to keep helping as long as they needed, and promised to visit them when they really returned to their life in the future.

17:00 Matsushima

Matsushima is a group of islands near Ishinomaki. There are some 260 tiny islands (shima) covered in pines (matsu) – hence the name – and is ranked as one of the Three most beautiful views of japan  .

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Despite the proximity of Matsushima to the Tsunami, the area was protected by the islands and suffered little damage. They were damaged by earthquakes, but tried to be recovered before GW, and they just reopened their ryokan, we were the first guests after earthquakes!

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Open air hot spring the best view in Japan on my back…

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30/April(Sat)

7:30 Departure to Ishinomaki

8:30-15:00

Some continued work of previous day, some were assigned to new house. On 2nd day, no one needed to be told what to do, we all worked proactively, taking extra caution to avoid injury. There were broken glasses and nails and spikes everywhere.

One thing I noticed living in a metropolitan city like Tokyo where we often don’t know who’s living our next door is, here in Ishinomaki, we exchange greeting everyone, everyone show our sincere appreciation for their commitment both in words and in attitude.

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1/May(Sun)

Some of us enjoyed after work beer too much the night before, I saw many were taking aspirin at breakfast table..

One more work before going back to Tokyo.

And as an important mission during GW, we delivered 1200 pairs of brand new shoes to Ishinomaki and Watari-cho. A generous company let us use a truck for free and volunteers delivered  them driving for 30 hours going up and down.

12:00 Finish work

13:00 Departure to Tokyo

In exchange of our crew, 17 Nadia crew arrived from Tokyo, and 15 more coming next day. They took over our mission, and we left Ishinomaki.

Despite the fact that we had very tough days doing physical work, we are somehow refreshed, recharged our energy.

 Having a break a few times on our way back to Tokyo, I bought a famous Miyagi prefc. sweets made with green beans.

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20:00 Arrived at Shinjuku

 72 hours ago, we were total strangers to each other, but after spending time together at Ishinomaki, we all became comrades. We hugged and promised to see each other at Ishinomaki soon.

This is how our GW became literally Golden….