Report of Vegetable Supply to Evacuation Centers

    Hello, I’m a member of HARU. This is my first posting in our blog.

    Few days after starting HARU, towns in Sendai city had been almost reconstructed as they were before hit by the earthquake.  I felt that I was going to forget the disaster. At that time, I happened to see a tweet on Twitter, from an evacuation center, which made me strongly shocked.  It said:

“There is little food in xxx evacuation center. We share one rice ball within one family for a day. Please help us.”

I thought I had to send foods immediately. But, I noticed that I didn’t have enough money to buy foods for all the members in this evacuation center, and even if I could afford it, I would have no way to convey them. I felt helpless. But I couldn’t just let it go without doing anything, so I sent an e-mail to a vegetable store in Sendai, “Please give me vegetables to send to people in an evacuation center.” The vegetable store readily agreed with me, and gave us vegetables and fruits.

    The manager of the store said “I also wanted to send vegetables to people in an affected area. But the traffic was limited but for emergency vehicles, and I had to tearfully return. As a vegetable store, what I can do is to give vegetables.  So, I’d like to ask you to bring vegetables to disaster area.”I asked a teacher to bring these vegetables to affected area. In a small evacuation centers at coast side, there were rice or preservative foods, but lacked of vegetables and fruits. Hearing that they were very happy with presented vegetables and fruits, I also felt very happy.

     There are not many things I can do by myself, but there are many people who want to do something for others.  I think it was such a good experience that we could share smiles with people in the affected area by reaching hands together. On the other hand, I feel that collecting information of needs in affected areas is very difficult, because situations there change day by day. For example, in some cases, they would not be happy if we brought vegetables where people had a lot of vegetables. In other cases, it might end up with being thrown away if we brought little supply to where many people escaped, for inconvenience of inequality.

    I want to continue working on vegetable supply activity.  I think I should continue searching where and what the demands are, and I will do my best to make affected people vigorous. Actually, I want to start fund-raising for vegetables supply for evacuation centers.

Let’s make Japan vigorous together!