Last day in Ofunato. I went with Keith and two other guys to take up the floor on a small house and disinfect the soil underneath with EM spray. The house was interesting. It was a small wooden house with only two rooms – a bedroom and a storage room. Very old. So old that the boards of the house had dried up and brittled into a gray color. At first I thought it was connected to a newer structure whose occupants were giving us instructions, but actually it was an entirely separate building. The resident was gone for the day. The newer building was just built in a way that wrapped around the older building. The gap between the two couldn’t have been more than six inches.

We removed everything from the bedroom and took up two boards to get a look under the floor. Because the boards were so old, we decided to rake the mud from outside of the house rather than risk breaking any of the floor. Underneath the house was a treasure chest of old wood and bamboo, possibly from when the house was first built fifty or sixty years ago. Once we dragged all of the stuff out, we raked a bit of the mud, sprayed the EM disinfectant, and then moved on to the newer structure which had actually taken more water during the tsunami. The front room of the building had about a foot or so of water, so we removed the boards from part of the front room and sprayed underneath a hallway. We also had to go back and spray a small additional bit of the older house.

We managed all that in the morning, so in the afternoon we joined up with the team working the ditches. The ditch team was an appropriate way to end my time with All Hands – that’s what I did my first day. The team has made significant progress since that day. They are within a block or two of the local NTT building – much closer than when I first got here.

Keith and Norm, an older Scottish/Engishlman, were racing through some of the ditches, and we really made a lot of progress in the short time we were there. Supposedly our ditch digging and canal cleaning have made quite an impression on the local authorities. They’ve asked All Hands to do 4km more of the ditches – 2km on either side of a road.

I gave a short farewell at the evening meeting, and we hung around the Sakari Base drinking beers for a little while before walking back to the Fukushi no Sato Center.

Although I’m leaving tomorrow (after I spend the morning doing housekeeping at the Fukushi no Sato Center), Project Tohoku will be in Ofunato for a while. All Hands just announced an extension from July until September. Knowing that the Haiti project is still going strong, who knows how long Project Tohoku will continue if funding isn’t an issue. So definitely send in your information to the project to keep up with the latest information, and donate if you have the cash. As far as I know, they are prioritizing Japanese and Japan-residing foreigner volunteers over international volunteers, but if you can speak Japanese and English somewhat fluently, you can help do important interpretation and they’ll probably consider your application. Japan has given me so much over the past ten years, and I was really glad to give back, even if it was just for ten days. Maybe I’ll find a way to come back and help out again. Hopefully some of the people I’ve met here will still be around then.