#typhoon damage

Kyza's a friend of a friend of mine who's been affected by Typhoon Rai.

Their house was flooded and they're without power or reliably running water. Now their family is without income. Please, if you can, d*nate to Kyza in the link for bare essentials and recovery from damage. If you can't d*nate, please reblog this post.

(another delayed post, mid-October)

The Power of Water

The sound of a burbling brook or a trickling stream is a soothing sound to many people, and the view of a lazily flowing river or a serene lake is part of an image of paradise. But these bodies of water can also grow into a mighty fearsome force with the catalyst of a storm…or four. Through August and September, Hokkaido has had an unusual amount of rain from typhoons running over the island and wreaking havoc in the form of landslides and floods. In typhoon conditions, those peacefully babbling brooks turned into powerful and indiscriminate destructors, decimating crops, sweeping away homes, takings lives, and washing out roads and bridges, cutting off whole communities.

One badly hit area was Minami-Furano in the center of the island with a population of just under 3,000 people. Minami Furano has a central town big enough for a post office, a school, and a few restaurants. It is surrounded by mountains and farms, and was badly damaged by these typhoons when the modest river, which winds along a valley, surged. The river has since subsided but most river-side properties, including roads and bridges leading to the community, have been severely damaged. The town has designated a local gymnasium as the staging area for typhoon relief and is asking for volunteers to help with the clean-up at least until the snow flies.

On the second weekend of October, a group of 13 of us JETs assembled to help in the clean-up in Minami-Furano. In total that day, there were roughly 120 volunteers, some who had traveled quite a ways to volunteer in the relief effort. It was a cloudy day but it wasn't raining so us JETs, along with a hand full of Japanese volunteers, were assigned to a river-side agricultural farm where we scoured a depressed-looking edamame bean field in the morning for shreds of plastic tangled in the plants, broken glass, pottery, and natural debris like sticks, carrots, and potatoes washed down from upstream. In the afternoon, we tackled the task of detangling a heap of plastic veneer and metal rods about the length of two persons tall that used to be greenhouses for tomatoes and peppers.

The overall mood was of course a bit of pity for the amount of yield lost from the crop, but also determined and hopeful and, at times, even cheerful, as we made progress on the clean-up and made friends with the locals through our teamwork. We left at the end of the day having made a small dent but clearly a lot of work still needs to be done and I'm sure that Minami-Furano and other hard-hit areas will still be feeling the effects of this string of storms for years to come.