This morning I cleaned up the Fukushi no Sato Center with three other people. We swept the floors, vaccuumed the carpets in our common living spaces, cleaned the bathrooms and the toilets, and cleaned the bathing/shower areas outside of the big tub. There are some days when the tub itself is scheduled for a clean, but today was not one of those days. I made friends with some of the staff because I was constantly asking them for refills of cleaning liquid, extra toilet paper, and foot mats to put down in the bath.
I also got a peek at the daily activities of the residents. On the first floor there are eight or so rooms that house old people that need help living. This morning they were up and about, and people were helping them out. They get bath time at around 11am, so we had to finish the baths by then.
This was not the most glorious of work to be done, but it has to be done, or else the areas where we live would get filthy. I was comfortable with all of the work we did today because of the time I’d spent on Dorm Crew – a student run program at my college that hired students to clean dorm toilets during term time. During the summer we did a full clean of all the dorms. Signing up to clean Fukushi no Sato Center also meant that I got first choice of jobs for tomorrow.
After we finished, we walked down from the Center to Sakari Base to have lunch and join up with other teams for the afternoon. The first team I was joined was basically done for they day. They were gutting two houses – all the floorboards were torn out, and the drywall had been removed. After that, the team sprayed a substance which is called EM. I need to research this substance a little more, but apparently it comes from Okinawa and is some organic compound made of yeast. It can be recreated effectively several times using sugar, and the yeast or whatever is in it eats away all the germs. So I watched as another guy sprayed the house. I helped do a little detail work on left over drywall.
After we finished there, I joined with another team which is organizing a new base across from the Sakari Base. Someone connected with All Hands owns the building which used to be a music store. The store closed long, long ago and has since been used as storage. It’s filled with all different types of furniture, pieces of wood and metal, boxes of CDs and posters, huge stacks of plates of glass, and more. Everything was covered with dust. For the last hour or so of the day, I helped move things from the second floor to the first and separate them into useful and non-useful piles. The building is a cool space, and once they get it set up, it will really make life around Sakari better for volunteers – they plan on installing showers, so they won’t have to use random showers anymore.
Tomorrow I’ll be working wit a team removing floorboards and gutting a house. It should be interesting to see the project from start to finish. Today I was only able to see the house after the floors had already been ripped out.
Oh, and we went out for karaoke tonight because it was one of the team’s last night. I managed to get everyone into cabs and back to the Center before the 10pm curfew. Great success.
Updates – pics:
Here is Norm in action, spraying the EM disinfectant throughout a completely gutted house:
On the walk back to base from the house, I spotted the waterline on one of the houses. In the distance you can see the post office (with the orange sign) with a matching waterline. To give you an idea, this section of town is pretty far from the coast. It’s on the one of the main shopping stretches of Ofunato, which is parallel to the main highway a block over (like many Japanese towns):
