The Mercy Corps Blog

Fishing boats in Minamisanriku anchored at the port, unable to go to sea due to the harsh conditions. Photo: Sylvia Ross/Mercy Corps

A department store and hospital — all that remains of downtown Minamisanriku. Photo: Sylvia Ross/Mercy Corps

As luck would have it, I happen to be visiting the northeastern region of Japan during a record cold spell. In the seven days since I arrived, it has not been above freezing yet. In fact, the temperature hovers around a cool 20 degrees (F).

Every day a few more inches of snow cover yesterday's batch and each day, for a little while, the sun manages to peek out. The roads in this very mountainous region are completely covered with snow. Even though it is not their norm, the locals seem completely unfazed as they jet around in their tiny cars. The snow also covers all the tsunami wreckage — the leftover foundations where houses used to sit, the exposed beams remaining from office buildings, the chewed-up cars and boats here and there. Everything has an eerily peaceful white layer over it.

The people I talk to about the weather refer to the snow last year, after the tsunami. In fact, one day after the tsunami hit, snow began falling somewhat unexpectedly. It made the already dire conditions almost impossible. People were still drenched from the cold ocean water when the temperatures started plummeting and snow falling.

A year later, these current conditions have also made it difficult for us to visit some of Mercy Corps' work. On our second day here, we boarded a small bus and set out to visit the wakame seaweed program. The journey took us through the steep hills of Minamisanriku. Big, soggy flakes of snow were falling as we chatted when all of a sudden, our bus stopped climbing the hill — or more accurately, started sliding backwards and sideways. With our transportation stuck in a snow bank and a program to see, we got off the bus and walked to our destination. The scenery was breathtaking, but my face and toes were numb, my camera disabled due to the cold — and I couldn't help but think about my Mercy Corps collagues around the world whose typical day in the field is much more likely to include 100+ temperatures, sunburns, bugs and stifling humidity.

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Adam Stelle of Startup Weekend, former Googler Gisel Kordestani, and Andy Dwonch and Andrea Koppel of Mercy Corps discuss tech entrepreneurship in the West Bank and Gaza at an event in Seattle last week. Photo: Mercy Corps

Last week, Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood was abuzz with a rare combination of techies, social investors, Arab world watchers and humanitarians. This eclectic group was brought together to learn about a unique program called the Arab Developer Network Initiative (ADNI). Formed by Mercy Corps, Google.org and the Source of Hope Foundation, ADNI boosts the efforts of young people in the Palestinian Territories to become technology entrepreneurs.

Unlike the typical Mercy Corps event, this panel of speakers from Mercy Corps, Google.org and Startup Weekend didn’t mention giving away food, water, shelter or other kinds of assistance. Instead, they talked about fostering a culture of entrepreneurship, and in some cases, doing what’s often considered taboo in the aid world: encouraging failure.

“We’re not giving people fish, or even teaching them to fish. We’re saying: Go fish! Entrepreneurs will learn from failing,” explained Adam Stelle, COO and facilitator of Seattle-based Startup Weekend, which runs 54-hour events around the world, bringing together techies of all stripes to share ideas and launch startup companies. They’ve already run one Startup Weekend in the Gaza Strip – the winner plans to establish a mobile-based service to remind ailing patients to take their meds – and there will be more in the coming months.

For young techies in Gaza who are hungry for economic opportunities, the experts who visited from Google are their heroes; they’re who these young people want to become. Google is also hungry for opportunities — there’s a global gap of Arab-language content and applications that young, enterprising techies in the Palestinian Territories can start to fill.

So what’s a global humanitarian agency like Mercy Corps doing in this mix? In a place as isolated as Gaza, Mercy Corps provides the critical local connections, know-how, and startup capital that other investors are too risk averse to offer. Through ADNI, Mercy Corps isn’t providing non-profit solutions; we’re facilitating for-profit ones.

As Mercy Corps’ Senior Director of Social Innovations Andy Dwonch explained, the complicated politics of Gaza mean that the only economic opportunities are virtual, and a tech-savvy youth population is well positioned to jump on these. Dwonch asserted that the end game of Mercy Corps’ work in Gaza isn’t a successful aid program. Instead, “The big win of Mercy Corps’ work in Gaza is new companies and whole lot of jobs.”

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Hiroko Mirura leads 400 women who have found jobs in the local wakame seaweed industry, back in operation thanks to equipment donated by Walmart and distributed by Mercy Corps. Photo: Sylvia Ross/Mercy Corps

New equipment stands ready for the boats to return with the latest seaweed harvest. Photo: Sylvia Ross/Mercy Corps

Yesterday I met Hiroko Mirura. In her early 60s, Ms. Mirura is a former scallop merchant, proud wife of a fisherman, and a strong female leader in the town of Minamisanriku. Hiroko's impressive life boasts many accomplishments, including being the only female board member of the town's powerful fishery association.

But last March, Hiroko's husband was swept away in the tsunami, and her house and business were decimated. Overcome with grief after losing her husband, she went into a deep depression for the next three months. She didn't eat. She didn't get out of bed.

Then one day, she decided that her drive to help her community was stronger than her grief. She wanted to do what little she could to mobilize the other grief-stricken women in Minamisanriku —and it turned out that 'a little' was a lot. She started hosting teas for the unemployed women in town, which led to a community candle-making venture, which led to the need for re-employment. With a little help from Mercy Corps and Peace Winds Japan, and thanks to the generous support of Walmart, she is transforming her community.

Today, Ms. Mirura is in charge of mobilizing the 400 women who have gained employment through Mercy Corps' wakame seaweed program.

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Muriya Mohamed and her four children feel more secure being able to use the new latrine within their homestead, built through a Mercy Corps cash-for-work program. Photo: Muna Ahmed/Mercy Corps

Muriya Mohamed and her four children — Bishara, Gabey, Nuh and Issak — proudly showed me the new latrine in their community.

It was built by local people paid by Mercy Corps to improve sanitation and water facilities here in Wajir, a part of northeastern Kenya hit hard by the drought and food crisis across the last year. Our team is giving people who have lost their animals – and only source of income – the chance to take on short term community improvement tasks like this in return for cash to buy essentials like food and medicine. Creating work in return for a fair wage in this way helps keep what’s left of the local economy going, and allows families to buy exactly what they need rather than rely on emergency handouts.

The results themselves bring long-lasting benefits as well. Muriya told me that the latrine in her community is making life safer for women too: “Before the latrines were constructed, I had to go far into the bush to relieve myself. There are lots of risks going into the bush at night. It’s not safe, especially for women. Attacks from wild animals like lions, hyenas, poisonous snakes and foxes are very common.”

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Palestinian youth gathered in December to incubate web development ideas — and business opportunities — at a Startup Weekend in Gaza. Photo: Will Weathersby/Mercy Corps

Gaza isn’t necessarily the first place you think of for a Startup Weekend. These 54-hour events, started by a Seattle nonprofit, bring together web developers, designers, marketers, product managers and aspiring entrepreneurs to share ideas, form teams, build products and launch tech startups.

It’s a place few people ever get to visit, let alone a group of experts from Google and international business professionals from Mercy Corps. But the political limbo that has led to a virtual blockade of the area has inspired the many youth here to cultivate their talents around information and communication technology (ICT), making it a fertile place for innovation.

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Minamisanriku elementary school still stands empty and surrounded by debris. Sylvia Ross/Mercy Corps

Inside, water-logged photo albums are a reminder of life before the disaster — which residents are working hard to rebuild. Sylvia Ross/Mercy Corps

Today I arrived at a small fishing town in northeastern Japan called Minamisanriku, which was partially swept away by the March 2011 tsunami. I’m here to visit Mercy Corps programs that, along with our partners Peace Winds Japan and Planet Finance, have been working for the past nine months to help jump-start the local economy working with fishermen, small business owners and local merchants.

I honestly didn’t know what to expect from my first trip to Japan. On one hand, less than a year ago, this area was with a disaster of unimaginable proportions; on the other hand, this is Japan — known for its diligence, incredible work ethic, organization and resolve — so perhaps the damage would have been scrubbed away and the town’s physical scars now invisible.

True, the survivors have been moved from shelters to temporary housing; true, the roads are again passable; true, children are in schools, people are fed and life is churning. These are all fantastic signs of progress.

But everywhere are bitter reminders of the tragedy that took thousands of lives and ravaged the region. As my bus descends the mountain pass into the coastal plain that is the tsunami zone, I see random car wrecks sit strewn about in the most unexpected places, as if a child randomly tossed his Hot Wheels. A large office building sits upside down where it was left by a wave, in the middle of a debris field. The local elementary school, which was completely submerged by the tsunami wave, is just a skeleton of its former self, with no windows, but curtains still swaying. I walk inside one of its classrooms and find water-damaged musical instruments, decaying toys and barely recognizable photo albums.

The locals here are forever altered, and yet, they’re filled with resolve to rebuild their lives, to rebuild Minamisanriku. They talk of those they have lost and, in the next vein, they tell of their dreams to one day rebuild their shops and homes, resume their lives as they were. I’m looking forward to seeing the renewal in progress.

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Afghanistan's winter can be unforgiving to people with little shelter and access to services. Mercy Corps offers aid and vocational training to improve livelihoods and works to manage natural resources to alleviate later flooding. Andrea Koppel/Mercy Corp

I awoke this morning to heavy snowfall in Kabul. The airport was closed, the water pipes were frozen and there was no city power.

It is challenging in Afghanistan even for Mercy Corps to continue business as usual in this stark winter weather, with huge increases in traffic accidents, team members struggling to get to work and delays for essential supply deliveries that others are relying on. I am thinking more, however, about those who are most vulnerable. The widows, the orphans and the poor who live in both rural and urban Afghanistan often have no one to care for them or to make sure they are warm and fed.

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Many buildings in Rikuzentakata were completely destroyed by the tsunami. Photo: Chie Togo/Mercy Corps

Even lamposts were bent to 90 degrees, and it was plain to see where the raging water had torn through buildings. Photo: Chie Togo/Mercy Corps

When the earthquake and tsunami hit my homeland last March, I was devastated. Though it had been twenty years since I left Japan to move to the US, I knew I had to go back and help.

Ordinarily I work for Mercy Corps Northwest, the part of Mercy Corps that helps people in Oregon and Washington here in the US to increase their economic self-sufficiency and integrate with the community. But I heard about the work the Mercy Corps and our partner Peace Winds Japan were doing to support communities recovering from the tsunami, and asked if I could spend my vacation helping. It took a while to arrange, but eventually late last year I finally managed to make it out to the northeastern region of Tohoku to spend a week with the teams there.

When I arrived at the station in Ichinoseki, I was met by falling snow and bitter cold temperatures. I worried not only about the week-long volunteer stint that lay before me, but what impact the freezing temperatures would have on our efforts. But when I made it to the office and saw how hard everyone was working and how welcome they made me, I knew everything would be okay.

At first I spent some time helping in the office in Ichinoseki, helping to translate from Japanese to English. Then I travelled with the team to Kesennuma, a coastal town decimated by the tsunami. As we got off the train, the station itself looked like nothing had happened. But beyond it was a different story. In fact, it was worse than anything I’d ever seen. As we got closer to the seafront there were destroyed buildings, wreckage and debris as far as I could see. Every streetlight was bent at a 90-degree angle. I could see where the tsunami ripped through the insides of all the buildings. It looked like a huge bomb had been dropped just days before.

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Sann Htet Lin talking in front of the tree nursery he and the other members of his community have built. Photo: Benny Manser/Mercy Corps

Some of the Mercy Corps team in the delta region who are helping community groups like Sann Htet Lin's grow. Photo: Benny Manser/Mercy Corps

I’m 19 years old and I live in Bokone village in Myanmar’s Ayeyarwaddy Delta. Together with eight other people from my village I am part of a community organisation called Sein Pyae Aye Yar. In English, it means Full Green Ayeyarwaddy Delta.

With help from Mercy Corps, we’ve been working since 2010 to help make our land green again, preserving what trees and mangroves we have left and replacing the many that have been cut for firewood with new ones.

We’re only a small group, but we’re doing everything we can to help our village. As the trees and mangrove forests around our village disappear, people have been left without shelter from cyclones and storms and at risk from floods — and have to travel far or pay a lot for wood to use to cook and boil water. So like other groups across the Delta, with funds and lots of training from Mercy Corps we’ve started to make our own special stoves that burn less wood, to grow and plant tree saplings to replace those that have been cut, and to work with the people of our village so we all know more about looking after the environment around us.

At first, we started by talking to everyone at community meetings. We asked them about what they thought their needs were and collected information about how people get firewood and what their problems were. Then we started talking to everyone about environmental awareness, global warming, how things like using special stoves can use less wood and save everyone money too. We also told them about our plans to grow saplings to protect everyone from storms and other problems from lack of trees. Now I’m in charge of the nursery where we grow saplings. After talking to the community we decided to grow lots of eucalyptus as it grows fast and is good at stopping strong winds.

We want everyone to participate and be joint owners of the trees and look after them, so we have decided to ask the village to pay a quarter of the cost of the trees, while our group covers the rest. This way everyone benefits. Without help from Mercy Corps and our community organization the village could not afford these trees, but by paying a little of the cost it makes everyone care and look after them.

We are happy that we can help our community develop. With the support we have had from Mercy Corps we are beginning to make a real change and we have a vision that our organisation will be around to help people for a long time. It is important that we have ownership of the whole process and can make the decisions that are right for us. We are proud that we can make this project happen ourselves.

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Mercy Corps is giving Haitian business owners like 46-year-old Morse Alexis the support they need to keep their enterprises going. Photo: Fabiola Coupet/Mercy Corps

Two years after the devastating earthquake, small businesses are more crucial for Haiti’s economy than ever before.

In every town, on every street, shopkeepers, traders and craftsmen are working hard to provide their communities with the essential goods and services of daily life - and in so doing, lift their families from poverty. These small-scale entrepreneurs are vital in helping Haiti recover and rebuild after the terrible earthquake in 2010.

Yet these small business owners live day-to-day, with little cushion against unexpected shocks like natural disasters or a family member’s illness. When they’re knocked down by bad fortune, they often lack the resources to get up again. Haiti is especially vulnerable to catastrophes that can erase, in a moment, the years of labor a person has already invested in building a more secure life.

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