The Mercy Corps Blog

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Children play happily at this Kesennuma day care that was reopened with a Mercy Corps grant designed to help small businesses after the tsunami. Photos: Sylvia Ross/Mercy Corps

Today my heart sang. After days of seeing destruction and rubble, I got to visit the tiniest tsunami survivors at a day care in Kesennuma, Japan. After it was destroyed in the tsunami, the day care was recently restarted with Mercy Corps' help .

I walked into a sun-filled, colorful room and right away felt like I could stay there all day. Eleven adorable babies, from five months to three years old, were happily playing and coloring, as they sat in their tiny chairs, their chubby fingers swirling crayons on paper. Missing my own (similarly-aged) kids so much, I just wanted to sit there and soak in the cuteness.

Today, most of these children live in temporary housing, and some lost a parent in the tsunami; the owner of the original day care is still missing. Determined to bring back this invaluable service for the working parents in Kesennuma, seven of the original 15 employees pooled their money and received a start-up grant from Mercy Corps, through its partner organization Planet Finance.

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The entrance to a food court-style assembly of various restaurants in temporary structures in Ofunato. Photo: Sylvia Ross/Mercy Corps

Temporary "shopping mall" plazas like this gather stores around the perimeter and offer attractive walkways and seating areas. Photo: Sylvia Ross/Mercy Corps

I’ve spent about half of my time in Japan since the March 11 tsunami, working with our partners on the various relief and recovery projects. And each visit — whether I’m there a few months or just a couple weeks — presents a new face on the recovery.

My first visit was marked by people trying to access basic needs and get by in evacuation centers as they experienced the raw grief and trauma of the event. During my second trip in July, most people’s basic needs were taken care of, but they still needed a place to live. They began shifting to temporary housing units as soon as the government could get them built. With a new place to live, they had a new reality: new neighbors, new commutes, new expenses. It was hot and sweaty as people tried to settle in, but at least they had a place for their family to be together.

In October, the heat was thankfully gone, and it was time to get ready for winter. At that time, I also noticed that the infrastructure in the tsunami zone had come a long way. The debris was organized into piles, electricity was restored everywhere, and many roads and bridges were completed. The focus had shifted to revitalizing communities with rebuilding plans, jobs and economic recovery.

On this current visit, there’s a very obvious addition in the tsunami-affected zone – temporary shops.

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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.

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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. Find out how you can get involved.

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.

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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.

Those who live in tents provided by the UN are suffering terribly in temperatures well below freezing and with limited or no access to basic services. People are already walking miles to access water only to find it frozen, and many are struggling to feed their families as prices shoot up because of the breakdown in deliveries across the border.

This is why I believe in what Mercy Corps is doing in Afghanistan; concentrating not on handouts but on building a strong private sector economy is the only way to eliminate these tragic circumstances over time.

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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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