While supporting the immediate relief-supply needs of small communities affected by the triple disaster on 11 March, 2011, Team Sake is actively building up relationships and creating networks. In the process, as we see the vision of the future drawn from the villagers' hopes and ideas, we send it throughout the world on the internet, recruiting further assistance, to help bring these visions closer to realization. Providing such things as personnel (volunteer manpower), commodities, technical skills, and information, many people coming from across the nation, and indeed the globe, are able to use this website to assist survivors in whichever ways they themselves choose. This process in itself is considered to be the most encouraging and sustainable way of offering both short-term and long-term support for the villagers.

Aug 7, 2011

Team Sake Diary: Osu village

Villagers’ needs
May
On May 2, we visited to the Osu elementary school, a shelter in Ogatsu town. The school had remain standing on the hill, but the center of the town in the bay area was completely devastated. There were enough relief supplies but they hadn’t been able to put them in order yet. So they needed to get a lot of big plastic boxes to be able to split things up and get organized to actually use them and to be able to distribute them effectively. Takahashi-san, one of the core members running the shelter, said, “We most appreciate long-term support in one place. It is hard to ask many things to a volunteer who come here for the first time, but we can talk to the same person that we know and feel safe.” Another thing he was concerned about child care in affected areas. As an example of how children are being overlooked, he said, “There are things like tea in the relief supplies, but there isn’t any cola. The children have been tolerating this with little complaint. I feel sorry for them.” Later we had an opportunity to talk to an elementary school girl. She told us she was bored with eating the same instant noodles all the time.

Almost two months has passed since the disaster, but these people are still in need of a great deal of assistance on a very basic level.