Wednesday, May 11, 2011 Mucking, MRE’s, and the Sermon of the Mount

Early this morning Machiko, Alexis, Monica, Carol, and Marci headed back to Kobe. We took Tony and Mary Anne to the bus station. Joel stayed back at the dojo to clean up and organize our area.

Before dropping Stu off for his bus, he took us on a tour of the Watano Ha neighborhood where they had met some good people. It was a pleasant surprise to find Yasuhiro at home and before we knew it he was bringing us coffee which we drank sitting on stools in his driveway. Twenty years ago Yasu had attended a Christian-run University in Sendai. He told Stu that during the tsunami he remembered the Sermon on the Mount and it gave comfort and hope to know that God cared about him. He said his son was now attending high school at the same place he attended college

Because Stu hadn’t seen the commercial/port district up close I drove the long (but quicker) way around. The giant red tank was still on its side, and the railroad tracks were still hanging in thin air, but the previously flooded street had now been raised with several inches of gravel. It was a good thing we went that way because if we had taken the direct route, Stu would have missed his bus.

Stu had lived in Japan for a number of years, but most recently based in Singapore doing personal and spiritual development of ministers from Viet Nam and Cambodia. So for Stu it was great being back here using his Japanese. His ability to communicate was a real asset to the team.

Getting a late start, we picked up Joel back at the dojo, met Maya, and at the house (Chihiro’s cousin’s) near the tunnel entrance, we first had to finds a place to stack dishes, boxes and clothing. Then we got to pulling up the rotten floor. My technique was prying up the boards by breaking the nails loose board by board. But Ian found the giant digging pole and decided he could do it better by smashing the floor boards to smithereens. I’m sure it was very therapeutic, but we still had to pry the nails loose and now there were dozens of broken pieces and splinters lying in the mud. But did I say anything? Of course not. Ian was having too much fun. So we got half the floor removed and half the mud mucked, and at the end of the day Ian had a pretty good blister on his thumb. Dropped Maya off at her car.

The Jieitai (army) had set up an onsen (public bath) downtown in tents with generators for local residents without water and for cleanup workers. It was pretty basic but hey, it was free, and there was only the three of us so it wasn’t like this huge crew descending on the place. And—we ran into Joel’s real team which was working out of the second floor of a building nearby. The offered us some MRE’s but we passed.