Conference by Students of Affected Area in Kagawa prefecture

    This is Fukumoto, HARU Public Relations.

    I would like to share this time about Conference by Students of Affected Area in Kagawa prefecture.

    This conference was organized by Team Kagawa Students, which is consist of voluntary students of medical school of Kagawa University. In this conference, 7. Students who are students of Tohoku University, Fukushima University and Fukushima Prefecture Medical College, and  were involved in volunteer activities on reconstruction from the earthquake gave presentation on their activities and their future works. From Tohoku University, 4 students who did activities in HARU right after the earthquake participated.

Conference room in Kagawa University Medical School

    At the conference, each students gave presentation about how it was and how  they did after affection, about the fact of volunteer activity and what problems the have, and so on. Though they were all students, they all had different situations such that one who stayed at university hospital to help out back-stage medical care, one who drove around evacuation centers to help transporting supplies, one who went along with university hospital doctors to help on-site medical care, one who organized events for children at makeshift houses.

    By exchanging opinions and having relations to each other in this atmosphere, I think we can find new point of view. As one who do activities on site, I thought we have to think about how it is now and how we should do in longer period of time.

    I have another thing to think; I want to tell especially to whom were not affected, as one who know the affected area of that time.

    What if you are hit by unexpected and unparalleled disaster tomorrow? If you are not prepared for that, you'll be too surprised to make right decisions. (in fact, I couldn't.)

Imagine if that happened to you town.

    What dangerous would happen? Disasters form several shapes other than this tsunami. Collapsing on buildings, landslides, derails of trains, traffic jam because of black out, not being able to go home because of traffic jam and so on. The first thing you need to do is to save yourself.

    Afterwards what should you do?Do you know where to evacuate? How do you contact your family and friends? What if lifelines were cut off? Have you prepared evacuation bag? Do you have enough stock of daily essentials?

    You don't have to think of it all the time, but think and know about it at least once. Even if you don't go to the place nor do volunteer activities, it should be helpful to you sometimes. It would make much difference that you HAVE heard or thought when you face it. I would be happy if informations from us would help someone at someplace.

    It was such a good opportunity to be able to have contact with Shikoku, where such a far district from Tohoku, in such meaning. In the end I expect more people to think of what if I were involved in disasters.

Y.Fukumoto

After the conference,

(Students of medical school of Kagawa University  Team Kagawa Students, Tohoku University, Fukushima University, Fukushima Prefecture Medical College, Ehime University, and Tokushima University)

HARU Meeting

Hello, this is Kuboki, a member of Public Relations Section of HARU.

We held the 2nd whole-team meeting on November 24th.

We discuss about progress of each projects and topics which involve the whole team.

This time I would like to share what we have discussed in this meeting.

First, we shared progress and future work of all 3 projects, Library recovery, Study support and Field mustard. It was quite a nice occasion to get to know about other projects than I belong to.

Library and study support projects were doing activities daily, and also Field mustard project have progressed on contriving events which will be held next spring and summer.

Next, we discussed about a topic which recently came up.

Though short has it been since we had restarted, many, from professors in our university to foreigners, have suggested us new projects.

I can't wright much about specific contents. But we are willing to do whatever we can, one by one.

At last, we heard report about symposium at Kobe University. We could know what we wanted to refer to from January 17quake in1995 and volunteer activities since then.

At the end of this article, I'll share a photo of this meeting.

LIGHT UP NIPPON

    After 8 months of the earthquake, on  November 11th, a lecture by Y. Takada, who have found LIGHT UP NIPPON, was held at Tohoku University.

   LIGHT UP NIPPON was found to act on the situation we had after the earthquake, that people stop holding firework festivals, to cheer up affected area and all over Japan, by volunteers including Takada and workers in Tokyo.

     They realized 10 firework festivals at a time at affected areas such as Sendai harbor and MinamiSouma, involving many people, companies, and even governments, raising over 60 million yen. (for further information, see http://lightupnippon.jp/)

   I have learned many about producing events and projects, feeling much of his feeling for reconstruction at the lecture. The most impressive thing I learned was how important "to act" and "connection of people" are.

"To act"

   We have to actually take action to start something. There are many things you don't know until you start. Though you may face problems by acting, you can find ways to solve problems when you know what the main problem is. You can get more motivated when you overcome problems one by one.

"Connection"

    Connections can be a big energy for acting and challenging things. You can manage doing things more efficient when you know someone know about it better. Takada said LIGHT UP NIPPON have done all this by having professionals of each field in charge. Wider the connection you have, more chance you have.

    3 projects are in progress day by day after restarting HARU.

  New projects will probably be found for reconstruction. For that occasion we will apply what we have learned from the lecture and hopefully help reconstruction of affected area.

"Let's cheer Tohoku up and make them happy"

HARU Public Relations

H. Eto

After 8 months

Hi, this is Tsugawa, from public relation of HARU.

We are going to change how we disseminate our acts, as HARU changed its activity form.

Honestly speaking, we have escaped from a lot of things to protect us.

It was because we couldn't presume what would happen, and we were scared that those happenings might turn out to be serious problems.

In fact, we have faced numbers of failures and frustrations.

Also we have hesitated to disseminate our acts, for asking ourselves if we can do something we can really be proud of. We heard people say the word "self-satisfaction."

On this occasion we are re-examining the operations of HARU. We are feeling that we should confront to problems more authentically. We would like to share them here as well.

＊

Through our past actions, we learned how difficult it is to act for others. We have to understand genuinely what they need, sometimes those are implicit or opposite from what they say.

Still more, we have to take the measure if we can handle them. We might trouble even more for not being able to manage ourselves for strong sense of mission and responsibility.

Another problem is whether our actions actually help them or not.

To go to the extreme, the actions might extinguish their opportunity of getting the strength, mind or idea of overcoming the problem, where we cannot help them for entire future.

However, we won't be able to do anything if we thought of such things.

I thought that there is no way other than do things what we can do with cordiality and receptivity.

For that matter we need true heart to sympathize with others.

We will keep acting with real motivation, understanding, and sincerity.

＊

It's getting much cold these days in Miyagi as the daytime gets shorter.

Take care,

Y.Tsugawa

View from Tohoku University @Mt. Aoba

Tohoku University Festival, Nov. 3rd – 5th

Hi, this is Otsuka, HARU Public Relations Section.

The weather has been nice recently, but during the night it’s already cold. I feel winter coming. Tohoku University held University Festival in this nice, good weather from 3^rd to 5^th of November.

              The theme of this year’s festival is “Link Tompei.” “Link” stands for how we work all together under such circumstance that Tohoku district has had a hard time because of the earthquake. “Tompei” stands for Tohoku University students, with message of bond to be put out. This year they made cute little “Pi-to kun” a mascot character.

              During the festival, a lot of people from the area around visited the university to enjoy. I felt grateful to see it that we could hold this festival after the earthquake.

              At the festival, earthquake-reconstruction-related volunteer teams reported their activities as well as other ordinal events and booths. Although HARU unfortunately couldn’t participate in that, it was pretty good to know other team’s activity. At an exhibition, I felt as much of how lurid the tsunami disaster was by displays of bicycles, tires, and clocks that were swept up.

              What I have learned watching and listening to what people say at those exhibitions, no matter how different the way they stood up or how they act, we have all the same passion “for people in affected area” and goal “Reconstruction of Tohoku.” We should keep on doing what we Tohoku University students can, for long term, changing its contents to fit to needs.

              Each projects of HARU are moving on day by day. We would like to share report of those projects as well on this blog later on.

UN-Day 2011, Sendai

This is Kaisumi, a member of Public Relations Section of HARU. I participated in UN-Day conference held at Tohoku University, on October 24^th.

They had exhibition area for students in 2^nd floor of the building, thus we displayed our posters. The conference started at 10:30, with full of people inside the main hall.

   During lunch time, some others and I were helping out spinning participants to UN exhibition area, which was located at one of the innermost parts of the building. They had many displays from UN related organizations for example WFP and UNICEF. They displayed about their activities and those related to the East Coast Earthquake reconstruction supports. One of them which exhibited about children who cannot go schools because of helping out their house works reminded me of the days we had right after the earthquake, when we didn’t have power supply nor water. Fortunately my house weren’t quite affected by either earthquake or tsunami, so we stayed there. My family branched up doing living stuff, carrying heavy water and making meals which took so long.

We spent whole day just to “live.”

Comparing to situation of those who cannot go to schools, ours is nothing. But after that I can understand a bit more of it with reality.

        After lunch time, I could see panel discussion. Topic of the first half was “Work Through with Partnership.” They discussed that the first act is very important on emergency, that each professionals with emergency experience are quite helpful, and that people need to actually go to the place and find out what they need to be helped. Now winter is coming to the affected area, which make people there need more volunteers. They put out message that you cannot hesitate to go volunteering just because it has already been a while.

      The second topic was “To Youth Declaration from ‘Disaster and Volunteering.’”  In the beginning they discussed about role of NPOs and support system between local governments in emergency support. Later on students from Kobe University, from Bukkyo University and from Tohoku University who were from HARU, participated as panelists. In this session they discussed about role of student volunteers. They said that for people in affected area get encouraged to see volunteers coming, because they feel not being left alone.

I understood that individuals may be able to do little, but with whole bunch of individuals sum up together and make progress on reconstruction.

      At the end of the conference, students made “Youth Declaration:”

1. We would like to think about living with nature.

2. We learned we can do something as youth. We want to pass this act on reconstruction to next generation.

3. We are willing to continue on volunteering thinking of the needs of people in affected area.

4. We felt that the whole world have focused on this. We want to keep speaking out of how Tohoku (Japan) is being reborn.

Restart of HARU

HARU had acted a role on functioning as volunteer center inside Tohoku University. It has taken a pause since mid June, for many of our teammates having difficulty on having it both ways volunteering and studying. During the pause, we have discussed about activity policy and form of the team.

From now on, we restart HARU as a simple volunteer team, relinquishing our previous role as volunteer center and the mailing list. We are going to cooperate with Tohoku University East Japan Earthquake Student Volunteer Support Division:　http://www.tohoku.ac.jp/japanese/studentinfo/volunteer/01/volunteer0101/

We are going to work on 3 projects:
1. Education Support
2. Library Recovery
3. Field Mustard Project

For further information, visit:
https://sites.google.com/site/haruthuv/projects
(Japanese only)


All the members belong to either of the projects and take responsibility on it. We would like to increase the number of projects as possible with students and professors with new idea.

Since we are not going to use the mailing list anymore, we want those who are willing to work with us to join us as a member. We will let you know later on website or other tool.

We are very grateful that we could work with you all the registrants, for supporting Tohoku district reconstruction. We believe that our work was help to reconstruction.

Regards,
HARU Head Quarter Members