Dear Friends and Family,
It is early Monday morning and we are getting ready for week 2. We will work 4 more days on the Masu house and the drive back to Tokyo on Friday. We are hoping to finish the Masu house so the carpenters can begin restoring it soon. Today we will probably start digging out the muck and sludge underneath the house from the tsunami.
We had a busy weekend! Saturday we left Camp Morigo at 8:30 AM and drove back to Ishinomaki to set up for the Asiah concert. It took us most of the morning to set up the tents and chairs and picnic tables, etc. We went to McDonald's for lunch (you know...it was nice to eat familiar tasting food even if it was Mickey D's!). After lunch, we listened to the concert and then socialized (as well as we could) and served shaved ice (they put condensed milk on the ice with the flavoring...it is really good!!). We had a good turnout and everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves. After everyone was gone, we packed everything up. By then, it was dinner time, so we stopped for sushi. We have committed ourselves to try everything put in front of us, so we have eaten some interesting things like squid, octopus, sea urchin (not good), sea weed, and whale. We were tired by the time we got home.
There was no rest for us on Sunday either. We were on the road by 8:30 AM to head to a house church in Ishinomaki. With our group, there may have been 25 people there for church. The guest preacher was Portuguese and he had a Scottish/Japanese man translating for us. Throw in Americans and you have quite an International Church. The Church was very friendly and threw us a wonderful lunch after service. It was 1:30 or 2:00 PM before we moved on. From Ishinomaki we traveled north to Mimamisaruki to see some of the most devastated of cities. Mimamisaruki sits in a valley which pushed the tsunami wave into a smaller channel and consequently caused it to be much higher and more devastating (it swept over 3 story buildings sweeping away everyone that thought they were safe on the roofs). The destruction defies description! We have a picture of a train engine (the whole train car) that was swept down the street. Cars are piled up in massive piles. Buildings no longer exist. There was a radio station where a woman stayed at the microphone pleading with people to evacuate...she was killed and has become a local hero. There are memorials to her at the ruins of the building and bus loads of tourists come to pay respects and take pictures. They have also set up a pre-fab mini-mall where we stopped for awhile (I ate whale and chocolate cake). From there, we drove south along the coast passing through destroyed town after destroyed town. It became numbing after awhile. We ended the day at the Aeon Mall in Ishinomaki where we ate at the food court (much classier than our typical mall food court). Josh and I had ramen noodles and pot-stickers (much better than our ramen noodle packets). Watching the cooks make the meal was fascinating. We got home at 10:00 PM and I crashed.
Please continue to pray for us as we roll up our sleeves and get back to work on the Masu house!
We love you all.
Pastor Gary
