After the Wave* - Part 1

Last weekend I had the opportunity to volunteer in the town of Ofunato, which was hit badly by the Tsunami on 3/11. The organization All Hands was founded in the wake of the South East Asian Tsunami in 2005, and has brought volunteers to major humanitarian crisis across the globe since, including New Orleans post Katrina, and in Haiti after the earthquake there last year.

I had received the contract for my transfer to in Japan on 3/10. I had it on my desk waiting for my final signature fully committing myself to moving here for at least the next two years when I found out about the tsunami. Even at that point I felt some connection to Japan, and the disaster unfolding there hit me at a more visceral level then others around the world in recent years.

In a lot of ways the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant has overshadowed the far greater human impact of the wave.

Fortunately not everyone lost sight of the major humanitarian disaster. All Hands has been on the ground in Ofunato since March. I was the 1,020 somethingth volunteer to come through the operation. Many of the people I met up there had been up there since the beginning. They've managed to do incredible work, many have made great professional and personal sacrifices to be there. Some had come only for a week or two but found they couldn't leave or left and felt compelled to come back and do more.

Their project will come to an end soon but I'm planning on going up for at least more weekend. A lot has been accomplished, but there's an almost unimaginable amount of work that still needs to be done. I'm grateful to the All Hands organization and staff who gave me the opportunity to participate and see things for myself. I'm going to share a bit about my experience over the next couple posts.

*The title is a riff off of Haruki Murakami's After the Quake Stories, set during the Kobe Earthquake, I'm reading them now, recommended.