It has been a long time since my last
blog. It has been amazingly busy around here the last month or so.
We now have 8 houses complete and 49 more on the list! Each and
every one of those families has a unique story about March 11 and
will be telling it for generations. We get to be a small part of
what happened next.
About 2 months ago I got moved to
assistant manager to help with signing up new houses and running the
crews for mudout and construction. Now I spend a lot of my time
either getting supplies, figuring out logistics, or going to meet new
homeowners.
One day, I had a little bit of time
before my next appointment, so I did what I usually do when there is
extra time. Find a damaged house and ask if we can fix it.
I pulled up to a house with Nobuki, one
of our translators, and we asked the lady standing outside if she
needed any help. Usually this takes 10-20 minutes because in Japan
everything is relational and people really enjoy talking with each
other. Well after about 30 seconds Nobuki turned to me and said “she
dosen’t need any help”. No worries, this happens all the time. I
really didn’t give it a second thought.
The next day as I run by our jobiste
Nobuki tells me that a homeowner called and wants to set up an
appointment for me to look at their house. Awesome! It is much
better for someone to reach out to us than knocking on random doors
hoping to meet someone in need. So we set up an appointment for
later in the day.
I didn’t know where the new house was
or the name or anything, but Nobuki did so we headed out and ended up
at the same house that had turned us away the day before.
Turns out they had talked to the owner
of the house we were working on and had realized that we were legit.
After hearing more about our program and showing me the damage they
were overjoyed to learn that we could help them.
As we were leaving they asked if we
wanted any squid. My first though was NO! But we had just eaten
lunch so I said I was full. Then Nobuki turned to me and said it
was squid to be taken home and eaten later.
No way to graciously turn this down so
he took us around to the side of his house and handed me a huge
styrofoam cooler packed full of squid. Turns out he works in a squid
processing place and sells it to the markets.
In addition to being an awesome
translator, Nobuki is studying to be a chef and is a pretty good
cook. He was stoked to have so much squid to work with. He claims
to have never seen iron chef, but he did a real good impersonation of
it. That night we had squid salad, squid stirfry, squid pankakes,
and something else that illudes me at the moment.
It is always nice when a homeowner
shows appreciation for what we are doing here and it was actually
much better than I expected, but after so much squid in one night I
really have no desire to have it again anytime soon.
