One Year Later

On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 Japan Standard time, Japan was hit by a 9.0 earthquake—the most severe earthquake in its recorded history.  The resulting tsunami produced waves over forty feet tall, pouring over the seawalls across northern Japan.  These waves also breached the seawalls of the nuclear power plant, Fukushima Dai-ichi, leaving the plant in danger of meltdown in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.   We watched on the far side of the Pacific as the black water swept over cars, tossing them around like toys, even crushing huge boats under bridges.  We watched with bated breath as we heard mixed reports from what was happening at Fukushima Dai-ichi.  The world watched Japan as over 15,000 of its citizens lost their lives.

I was on Spring Break last year when it happened.  I remember sitting in my hotel room watching the TV, feeling my stomach drop as I watched the ticker-tape scroll at the bottom of the screen showing the increasing death toll.  I learned about nuclear reactors for the first time, and I checked online every day for the next month to see if there was news of success or failure at the power plant.

While I hope that news reports today bring Japan to our mind, I think many people have forgotten the condition that Japan is still in after the earthquake.  This week we have been folding a thousand cranes (which is a symbol of hope in Japan) to send to the Tohoku region all week, and many people who pass by aren’t aware that the anniversary was today.

Today is a day for mourning and remembrance.  Please take some time out of your day to pray for the many people in Japan who lost loved ones to the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami. 

Please also continue to keep Japan in your prayers.  For those living in the disaster areas, the crisis is not over.  One year later, over 300,000 people are still living as evacuees.  Some are in hotels or relatives homes, but many are still in temporary housing, which is usually no more than a school gym with cardboard partitions set up for rooms.  In addition to losing their homes, almost 40% of the evacuees lost their job in the disaster and have no source of income.  People are suffering from depression and insomnia.  These people who have already lost so much have to rebuild their lives—even their homes—from scratch. 

As we pray and mourn for the loss in Japan, I hope it encourages you to act.  Be the Good Samaritan and do what you would want to have done for you in this situation.  We pray for the Japanese people’s sorrow but we also pray for their hope.  We pray that in spite of the incredible scale of destruction, that Japan can be rebuilt.

Our team’s verse this year is from Isaiah 54 and it says, “’For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be moved,’ says the Lord, who has compassion on you.”  I still believe that God loves Japan, and that there is hope for the people of Tohoku.

If you want to make a donation to help Japan, you can visit http://crashjapan.com/.  Crash Japan provides food, water and other necessities to the affected disaster areas, and they provide a message of hope and love through Jesus Christ to Japanese people who are in desperate need of it. 

Thank you for keeping Japan in your memory, in your heart, and in your prayers.

Recap Blog 3: Thailand and Korea--Relax and Refocus

Midyear conference is a conference for all the STINT teams in Asia that takes place during the end of January.  It’s a chance to get rested and refreshed during your campus’ winter break, as well as a time to share with other teams how the year has gone and to be encouraged by the speakers.

Midyear took place this year in Thailand.  It was more than a bit strange to be getting on a plane to leave for our midyear when we had only been on campus for about a week, but Cru felt it was important for us to be encouraged by the other East Asia STINTers, and to get the full experience of what it meant to be an international missionary with Cru.

It was a long way to get there: a flight from Hilo to Honolulu, then to Seoul, then to Bangkok, and then a three hour bus ride to Cha-am.  Overall our travel time there was about 28 hours.

But what a sight for sore eyes when we finally arrived at our hotel!  Even though we didn’t arrive til 2 AM, our teammate Kimiyo (who had been in Japan this whole time) waited up for us to arrive.  It was the first time our full team was reunited since August.  We were stoked. 

Midyear was a place of challenge and of focus.  We spent each of the four days we were at the conference focusing on one of the four “L’s” of STINT: Love the Lord, Love your team, Launch a movement and Learn a new world.  Matt Mikalatos, a Christian author who is both a hilarious storyteller and a powerful speaker, came to share with us over the course of the week.  (Check out Matt Mikalatos’ blog here—I read and enjoyed both Imaginary Jesus and Night of the Living Dead Christian.)

During the evenings, we got to explore Cha-am…which is cool because it’s Thailand, but very touristy.  I had green curry and red snapper and ordered garlic bread on the side.  We also went to a night market to get souvenirs, and I managed to learn how to say “thank you” well enough from hearing it so frequently from the vendors that I managed to say it to my waiter the next day.  He laughed and corrected me, but at least he got what I was saying.

One of the strangest things about exploring Thailand for me was not being able to read anything.  I have been to France, to Japan, and to China, all places where my reading ability was extremely limited.  But French uses the Latin alphabet, I’ve studied Japanese, and Chinese and Japanese characters have enough overlap to be recognizable.  (I can read the word “fish” in all three languages!)  But the Thai language made me completely illiterate, unable to read, write, or even pronounce anything I saw.  It was rather disarming, to say the least.

Yup, that's a three-headed elephant.  Won't see that in Hawaii.

It was a cool chance to explore another culture, but more than anything else, Midyear was an important time to refocus and keep my eyes on the mission again.  I had been waiting around for a visa for months, and after arriving in Hilo we spent most of our time before arriving on campus trying to arrange housing and figure out how to get around town.  We got to spend time hearing about how ministry was going in other countries and how the work being done by our friends around the world is changing campuses and changing lives.  It was great to remember the vision of why we are in Hilo.

As a special bonus, on the way back from Thailand we had a 14 hour layover in Seoul.  A couple from the Japan mission trip I went on in the summer of ’09 are living in Seoul teaching English.  Kyle and Jess were welcoming and warm-hearted, a definite contrast to the weather outside.  Cha-am, Thailand, is near the equator, so we had packed for humid weather at the beach.  The high in Korea on the day we were there was 26 degrees Fahrenheit.  We had a frigid walk over to the royal palace, then headed to a restaurant for some bibimbap, a bowl of rice mixed with sautéed vegetables, chili paste, meat, and a raw egg.  Not my favorite, I’ll admit, but it was a delight to see how my friends had grown over the course of the past couple years.  Their faith continues to define their lives in their goals and in their career paths, and they are seeking to know more of God in their everyday lives.  It was so encouraging to meet up with them again.

Kyle, Kylan, me, Kimiyo, and Jess at a train station in Seoul

We got to re-enter Hilo with new eyes and a new focus for our work.  Right after we got over jet-lag.

Recap Blog 2: Campus Outreach at Hilo is NOT Campus Outreach at ASU.

First week of campus!  Always exciting and nerve-wracking.  We spent the first week on campus tabling for a club fair, giving away water bottles and candy and asking people to fill out spiritual interest surveys.  At the end of the week we had our outreach at the beach, where Albert taught free surf lessons.

The club fair was definitely the first time I got to see how ministry operated very differently at a small, commuter college like UHH instead of the huge university campus that is ASU.  At ASU, 0 week (the week before classes start) is one of our most important weeks of ministry.  Everyone pitches in on this crazy, hectic week when thousands of students are flooding the campus for the first time.  Every day of 0 week we hand out free snow cones and water bottles at the center of campus while passing out surveys.  Then every night of the week we have a welcome event.  One night we’ll have a huge game of cops and robbers across all of campus, the next night a barbeque, and the next a “Tour de Cru,” where we all bicycle around Tempe together.  Over the course of the week we hand out hundreds of freshman survival kits, and it’s an intense week for all sixty or more of us on leadership.

This first week on UHH was quite different.  We had our STINT Team of nine people and one staff member to reach the campus of 4,000, and pretty much no budget to speak of.  The club fair that we attended at the campus center plaza was in the main thoroughfare of campus, but only about a dozen clubs were advertising.  We offered a few water bottles, candy, and highlighters to people who would fill out our spiritual interest surveys.  Occasionally people would pick up a water bottle or highlighter, but virtually no one took the candy. 

We ended up getting 200 surveys filled out, which was great since we set a goal of reaching 120 students in the first week.  But more than that, tabling was an opportunity for us to see the student population and what we need to be aware of when doing ministry here.  One of the things I noticed was that there are a lot of toddlers at UHH.  You rarely see students with their children at ASU, but it’s not uncommon here.  You can also tell really quickly that UHH is a commuter campus, because no one really hangs out on campus so UHH is pretty much empty after 2:30.  There’s also a much higher percentage of students from outside the country or from U.S. territories.  We’ve met students from Japan, China, Guam, Micronesia, and American Samoa. 

For us, these aren’t just statistics.  This greatly affects how we reach out to students and how we try to build a sustainable movement for when we leave.  A student who has a tight-knit family community and a part time job while going to school won’t be interested in a midnight game of capture the flag the way a new freshman at ASU would.  We have to adapt our schedules, the events we run, and the way we present material so that we’re actually showing love and care to the students in a way that’s relevant to where they are in life.

Because almost everyone on our team has come from a large, public university, doing culturally relevant ministry at UHH is pretty foreign to us, even though we’re still in the U.S.  We’d all really appreciate your prayers that we would be able to have wisdom in caring for the students at this campus.   Mahalo!

Recap Blog 1: A Very Japanese New Year

So with all the rushing around as we got settled at the beginning of this year, I got a little bit behind on blogging.  I'd like to catch you all up on what's happened in Hilo since I left off, but I'd also like to write it in chunks that are a manageable size to read.  Therefore I've decided to write a blog covering each week that I've been in Hilo, and post one each day for the next week.  Hopefully this will get everybody (including me) caught up and I will keep on top of my blog from now on.

Without further ado, here is the week after Christmas' blog:

I have mentioned before that one reason Cru decided to relocate us to Hilo is that it is a good training spot for Japanese culture because there is a high population of Japanese-Americans here.  We’ve seen this frequently already.  Many of the restaurants nearby offer a menu in Japanese as well as English.  The Inn we stayed at in our first week was located directly above a shop that sold bento, a Japanese-style boxed lunch.  You can actually get bento every day at the UH Hilo cafeteria.

It was fitting that our New Year’s celebration should be Japanese as well.  On New Year’s Eve, we drove to a nearby town that was hosting a Japanese mochi-pounding for the New Year.  It was held at a Buddhist bed and breakfast that was run by a Japanese woman who had moved to Hawaii decades ago.  Mochi is a glutinous rice cake from Japan.  Mochi is made of a special kind of sticky rice, which is steamed, then put into a large pestle.  Two people work the job of pounding the mochi.  One person pounds the rice with a heavy mallet, and the other wets the sticky rice and turns it after each strike with the mallet, to keep the forming mochi consistent throughout.   Eventually the rice is pounded into a uniform, sticky and elastic mass, which is cut into cubes or wrapped around red bean paste.   A more Americanized version of mochi that’s served in Hilo will sometimes have a mini peanut butter cup inside.

Making mochi is a New Year’s Tradition in Japan, and Kylan, Amanda, Katie, Albert and I each got to take a turn hammering the sticky rice that morning.  There were other traditional Japanese arts at the bed and breakfast as well.  Calligraphy and Japanese paintings were for sale.  Taiko drummers performed thunderous pieces on their big drums, playing a piece that imitated the waves crashing against the shores of Okinawa.  Two men performed a traditional Lion-Dog dance, also originating from the island of Okinawa.

Pounding Mochi!

We were all impressed and had a good time, but I think most of all it gave me a chance to connect with the culture I was missing.  It helped me remember Japan, but not in a way that made me homesick for Tokyo.  It gave me encouragement that I could stay connected to Japan, even while living in Hawaii.  Not only that, but it helped connect me to Hawaii’s culture in a way that I could understand.  After New Year’s, I felt a greater connection with Hilo and an increased desire to know and care for the people who live here.

Here’s a picture of me pounding mochi and a picture of the lion-dog.  Hopefully this’ll help you catch a heart for Hawaii and Japan, like it did for me.