Child's play in Ishinomaki

The bus was crowded before anyone got on.

A bunch of us piled into a small rainbow-painted bus in a Tokyo suburb in the middle of the night. I was joining a group of parents from Abiko on their third relief run up to Ishinomaki City on the tsunami-scrubbed coast of Miyagi prefecture. The first two trips, they'd taken up truckloads of the necessities people were doing without as they lived in shelters or crowded into upper stories of half-gutted houses. This time, they were taking a children's fair. A midnight caravan to set up a one-day festival? There's something a little bit Something Wicked This Way Comes about it, except that the kids were already in a nightmarish situation and we were going just to bring a little cheer. The rented bus was crammed from the storage space underneath to the ceiling with donated snacks, games, toys, dolls, bicycles, generators, balloons, bingo cards, two sturdy trampolines, a cotton candy machine, and gear and ingredients to make 60 jars of homemade ice cream.

Fifteen of us wedged ourselves into the spaces that were left and drove from midnight til about 7:30 in the morning, stopping frequently. (Some strange goings on at the rest stops, but that's for another post.) As we drove through central Ishinomaki, organizer Yoshie said it was unbelievable how much better it was. At first, it looked like Main Street in any pre-dawn small city in Japan, with awnings running over the sidewalks on both sides of the street and neat shutters pulled down over each shop. A few places were boarded up like they were awaiting a hurricane. But then, some looked like they'd been kicked apart in a rage from the inside.

We set up in a grassy park near a temple at the top of a high, steep hill overlooking the water. The high ground saved a lot of lives during the tsunami. We had to carry all the boxes and bundles about 200 meters from the parking lot to the field. Happily, Jamie, Manish and a few other local volunteers from It's Not Just Mud met us at the site in the morning with hot coffee and plenty of enthusiasm.

We had a low table in the shade for kids to make name cards and a spot under a trellis where one crafty mother led the kids in making little animals and charms out of branches and pine cones. Some local volunteers made giant soap bubbles using bamboo sticks and string. The first kids to arrive batted around an oversized badminton set, and then ran around swatting volunteers with the rackets while we were setting up. The hardest part was setting up the steel-pipe trampolines donated by a school in Ireland via a Quakebook contributor. (Actually, taking them apart was even harder, as one little girl started crying and yelling at us to stop, clinging to the one she was on while we pried, pulled and kicked apart the other.) One of the most popular activities on a hot day was making icecream. An ingenious combination of two-liter bottles, ice, salt, jam jars and fifteen minutes of shaking -- plus a little cream, vanilla and sugar -- yielded a solidly frozen treat that one of the test-tasters said "tastes like the expensive icecream."

Icecream making was a big winner

Throughout the day, more than 200 people came through. Most of the kids seemed like they were about seven or younger. We hadn't known what to expect - fliers had been put up in elementary schools and public places where kids might be in Ishinomaki, but we had no idea how many or what age kids would come. At the end, when kids were lining up to get the overstuffed goodie bags that corresponded to the numbers they'd found in a balloon scavenger hunt, we were pleased to see that the rations fit the numbers quite well.

Yoshie said that while most people she talked to during the weeks of preparation loved the idea and many people pitched in with all kinds of help and donations, some told her it was a bad project, because the children don't need games, they need x. Or because you shouldn't help like that, you should help like y. Their ideas about what the children needed were simply their ideas; they weren't privy to any better information than anyone else. This is a painful thing that happens around volunteering or donating. Did you do enough? Did you do the right thing? The fact is, you can never do enough and there isn't one right thing. So if you have something you can do that will make some kids smile for a few hours, why wouldn't you do it? Back in Tokyo 24 hours after we left, we were all glad we did.
Yoshie put up a Freetohoku blog post in English and Japanese with lots of great pictures and details, including the off-hand comment that broke our hearts.
The photographer who went along with us posted some great photos from the day here.