Life in Tome

It's been a long time since my last post. Sumimasen.

A lot has happened since December. After months of planning and of getting over some mysterious intestinal disease, I am now working for Samaritan's Purse and living with the Higurashis, an Australian/Japanese family of ten kids which moved from Chiba to Sendai several months ago. Their home in Tome is traditional Japanese in that it is mostly wooden, barely large enough to house twelve people comfortably, and hasn't been updated much since it was built fifty or sixty years ago. It sits in a quiet farming community, with a small town nearby which I've only just today had the opportunity to ride my bike through.

I arrived in Narita airport maybe three weeks ago, and stayed several days in Chiba in the same place that I did during my internship with CCSI for the last three months of last year. After spending the night in Higurashi-san's mother's house a couple days later, Higurashi-san and I drove to his old home in Chiba (now his display house for his pool company) and loaded into his pickup, among other things, a refrigerator, and oven, a grill, and a dog, and then we departed for Sendai, a six-hour drive which wound up being closer to eight due to adverse conditions. Mr. Klause, a Tokyo-born missionary of American decent, gave me a ride to the Samaritan's Purse for the bi-weekly open dinner, where I signed over my soul to SP for two months in a painless, no-nonsense deal. Actually all I signed was an agreement not to sue, but SP has definitely proven very easy to volunteer for.

SP is an eclectic mix of skills and backgrounds, but it sends out teams of about four of two types: mud-out squads and carpenters. The carpenters are almost always professionals, sometimes college graduates in the subject. Usually, I work with my "mud-out" squad, the core of which consists of Nate and Chloe from a Baptist group called "Converge Worldwide", Takahashi-san, an Ishinomaki native, and sometimes Daniel, a Japanese-descended bilingual fellow from Alberta. We work Tuesdays through Saturdays preparing homes made uninhabitable by the tsunami last March for carpenters who will rebuild them.

At first glance, the coastal city of Ishinomaki seems to have been cleared up considerably since the tsunami. The streets are clear, there are large mountains of trash in fenced-in areas around the town, and some new convenience stores have opened along the main road. However, the destruction is also evident; perhaps four in five residential lots on which homes which stood a year ago are now vacant, and few of the few homes that still stand are habitable. Samaritan's Purse offers to do basic reconstruction work for free for any homeowner living in the area who is interested. That is, SP bleaches any wood which was affected by the tsunami and repairs any structures which were made unsafe. Even though it doesn't deal at all with amenities such as electricity and plumbing, SP volunteers and staff find plenty of time to engage the homeowners in conversation (at least the Japanese-speaking ones), and SP shares the gospel with every homeowner who uses it's service. Recently, SP celebrated it's 300th completed home, and it has a goal to complete a total of 450 (don't quote me on that) before it shuts down at the end of April.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the tsunami. It was a very sad remembrance. The emperor gave a speech, which I understood very little of, and there were memorial events all over the city of Ishinomaki.

Tomorrow I get back to work, so I'd better get to bed. If you have any questions or just want to talk, shoot me an email at jcloiacon@gmail.com or look me up on Facebook. I'm the only Julian Loiacono on it.

Thanks for reading.

じゃね。