Three Eleven. What do those numbers mean to you? For those of us here in Japan, we immediately remember where we were when the big earthquake hit on March 11, 2011. Our church continues to help with the recovery effort. This weekend there's a group up north who went to prepare a meal for those still in temporary housing. Last weekend we made sandbags. I enjoyed helping prepare these sandbags for seaweed farmers who lost their total livelihood when their wakame plants were washed out to sea.
Wakame, an edible sea plant, plays an important part in the Japanese diet. While admittedly the slime factor bothers me just a tad, the nutritional value is hard to argue with. It's low in saturated fat, is very low in cholesterol, and is a good source of vitamins A, C, E, K, and other helpful nutrients. Japanese use it in many ways, particularly in miso soup and in salads.Wakame is grown on lines in the ocean. These lines need to be weighted down with sandbags to keep them from floating away. Each farmer needs about 500 sandbags. Our church took up the challenge to help. We sewed the sandbags and decorated them with encouraging messages. I'm not very handy with a sewing machine, but we had good machines and a sandbag doesn't require any complicated stitching, so I made a few. However, most of the time I was on the decorating team. I enjoy writing Japanese and doing anything that even remotely resembles working on a scrapbook page. Thinking that it will help a farmer get on his feet again made the afternoon all that much more rewarding.
Working together with this diverse group of men, women, and children was great fun. Our group hailed from Japan, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Australia, Kenya, and the US. What do we have in common? We love Jesus and the Japanese. I didn't do much, but I was glad for the teeny part I could play in this project.
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