Empty-Handed

            When the sun came up, I finally got a look at the place where we had spent the night. (After groping around for my glasses, of course.)  We were in a small gymnasium usually used for the Japanese martial art of kendou. The ninja-like helmets and equipment were stored in nearby cubbyholes. A sizable Shinto godshelf hung on the gym wall near the ceiling.

            The city’s volunteer center housed somewhere around 60 last night, I would guess. There were also volunteers staying at a campsite slightly up the hill. Almost all were Japanese who had taken off work, etc. to spend anywhere from a day to a week helping out. Everyone was cheerful and friendly, making it a really pleasant group to be a part of.

            We were expected to wake up at 6:00 and do morning exercises outside at 6:30. Each group introduced itself and gave aisatsu (official introductions) to the others. Afterwards, we all ate whatever we had brought with us for breakfast. Our group actually set up a Coleman stove outside and feasted on eggs, bacon, and cheese grits, thanks to Georgia missionary Nathan Snow! My daughter said, “what’s grits?” My deepest apologies to my Southern friends for failing to pass on that aspect of our home culture!

            At 8:00 a.m. we got our assignment for the day. We would go to what was left of a house and shovel out sand and debris, down to the foundation. The top layer of big debris had already been cleaned up, but we were to take another 12 inches or so and bag it for removal.

            Driving to the site, I was stunned to see the area around the volunteer center in the daylight. Not more than 100 feet down the hill from where we had slept, we entered the devastation zone.

Our nearest neighboring building was the bombed-out shell of a nursing home. It still stood three stories high, but all of its contents had been taken out by the tsunami and strewn around the area. On the top floor, a filthy curtain was left blowing in the ocean breeze through the shattered windows. Mangled wheelchairs lay in random locations around the curb and parking lot. And, most surreal of all, there were two cars on the top of the roof – one of them a white Porsche.

I learned that, of the nursing homes’ 96 residents and staff members, 74 had perished in the tsunami.

We passed literally thousands of burned-out cars, flattened and piled on top of one another. The town’s concrete seawall, its only defense against the tsunami, lay toppled and scattered around like Legos.

The site we were working on was in a small inlet, behind a seawall of no less than 30 feet. There had been 30+ houses there before the wave came crashing down. A lot of cleanup had already been accomplished there, so little remained but foundations. As the men shoveled, we girls held the sandbags, tied them up and moved them to the curb. I had been worried that the work would be too physically demanding for me, but there was both heavy and light work that had to happen in order for the job to get done. We made a kind of assembly line and got the work accomplished during the morning hours.

Though all of the large debris had already been cleaned up, along with the bodies of those who died there, we found various objects buried in the heavy sand. A little girls’ shoe, a teddy bear, pieces of dishes, a flip-flop, a broken Nintendo game.

After a sandwich for lunch, we cleaned up and left the volunteer center. It had been pre-arranged for us to join a Japanese pastor in passing out food and supplies to the survivors in temporary housing. His church in Miyako is serving as a center to collect donations and distribute them to nearby survivors.

The “community” we visited consisted of 174 units. The prefab boxes resemble mobile homes, and each one contains 6 units of 320 square feet apiece.

As some of our group spread out a blue tarp and arranged the donations on it, those of us who can speak Japanese went door to door informing the residents that we were setting up. “We are from Miyako Christian Church and we’ve brought some things for you,” we said. Most of the residents hurried to put on their shoes and head straight to our little “tarp-mart”.

For today’s distribution, the church had received fruits, vegetables, diapers, sanitary pads, and insect repellent. They had also brought around 20 pairs of shoes in various sizes, a few stuffed bears, some hacky-sacks, a box of suckers, and a case of Christian CD’s.

Within 10-15 minutes, everything was gone. People were so eager and appreciative to receive anything, and we ran out far too quickly. Even though we had placed a limit on the items, there were quite a few residents who arrived too late to get anything at all.

One elderly lady tottered her way to the tarp, feet shuffling in the hot, dry dust and empty plastic grocery bag waving in the breeze. But by the time she arrived, there was nothing left. She had only wanted insect repellent, she said, but it was all gone. As I watched her graciously turn around and inch painstakingly back to her little box/home, my eyes burned with tears. Her walk was so familiar to me, because it is the way my own father walks these days. I know all too well how difficult it would be for him to make his way across that dusty field in the heat. I doubt I will ever forget the sight of that precious lady and her still-empty plastic bag.