After our visit to the fisherman’s home we drove to a temporary home complex next to Coco’s. Coco’s if you remember was where we had the takidashi the first time we visited Kobuchihama a while back.
Here we distributed more supplies to various people.
Next stop was at a local fisherman and his wife’s home. Their home was still quite intact. Probably saved because of the buildings in front of it and that it was located up somewhat on a mountain side. To get there we had to pass one of facilities of the Kobuchihama fishing communities. It was basically blown out, but they had started to renovate it.
At the fisherman and his wife we got fruits and talked for a long while. They have some spare rooms on their home that they let volunteers stay in free of charge. They were very nice people.
They also had got a few cute kittens 🙂
After our stop in Fukukiura we continued to Kobuchihama where we stopped at one of the temporary home complexes. Here we distributed 1/3 of what we brought to various people that have just moved into their new temporary homes.
We did not visit all the people living in the complex as it is impossible with the few resources we have. But it nevertheless feels terrible to not be able to help them.
Fukukiura is a small place not far from Kobuchihama. Although the places are quite close many people living in Fukuiura are in a worse situation than those living in Kobuchihama. For some reason Fukuiura seems to be the place which aid organizations forgot.
We supplied them with work clothes for fishing, water, yoghurt drink, bicycles, etc. It was fun to see a 8-10 year old boy playing with his new bike between houses that were all basically having a big hole where the ground floor was supposed to be.
The major income for Fukukiura is from growing oysters and seaweed. Something that I did not know was that it takes 3 years to grow an oyster, which means that with the tsunami the people that were in the oyster business basically lost 3 years of investment. Another way of looking at it is that if they plant an oyster seed (or larvae) today, it will 3 years before they can harvest that investment.
It took a while before I understood that all the piles of what looked like necklaces for giants were not that but for growing oyster. They put these ropes with scallop shells in the water and plant the oyster seeds on them. You learn something every day 🙂
Today we ordered 2 IBM Thinkpad G40 for Kobuchihama. This is an important means for them to stay connected with the world, and also to be able to order things online etc. You can find the details about the donation here.