Rescue Japan joined the festival at Soma City, Yunuki Temporary Housing Community, Saturday August 11th.
We arrived in the early afternoon to help prepare for the festival. Just before festival started, we said a few words to everyone about why we were there.
We helped with the cooking and serving drinks, water and soda to kids and some adults. We also served premium wines donated to us by the Japan Wine Challenge, to re-distribute to residents of temp housing in Tohoku. Among the donations were diapers from P&G, toothbrushes from Colgate Japan, and Dog and Cat food from Hills. We also donated sanitary gels.
The festival was a huge success. Suzuki-san the housing community leader said he had not seen the people of that community this happy in a long time. The wines were a big hit. The weather was good except is was very humid that day. So many of us were exhausted from the heat.
Iizuka-san is a volunteer from Sendai who coordinated our donations with the local teams, and arranged for us to stay over in Soma city Saturday night. We also met a number of other people involved in the festival who were very helpful in showing us around and offering hospitality including Yuri Kitani who performed Minyou style music during the festival, Nonaka-san a traditional Japanese music drummer, Imoto-san a monk from Osaka who presided over prayer before festival began, and Yoko Abe who graciously prepared meals for us and offered us to her home. She lost her son during Tsunami who was a fireman that tried to warn people in the Isobe area to leave before the wave hit their homes. Osawa-san was a resident we met who he and his wife explained many things about the temporary housing situation that unfortunately you do not hear on the news.
NOTE* To see the photos in great detail click on to them, then click again to zoom in.
After paying a short visit to Minami-Soma, we returned to Tokyo Sunday August 12th at approximately 11pm.
This Update is an extension of RRD-071512-A
Photo Library: https://rescuejapan.jp/_wp/?p=6060