A brown line

Here's the next English Challenge for September at Minami JHS.

Monday morning, I joined some brave souls and helped to clean up part of Makibi Higashi Junior High's campus. It had been two weeks since the flooding had devastated this area of Kurashiki. On the car pool ride over, we saw how a thin but very noticeable brown line marked all of the trees, houses and other buildings everywhere the river's water level had risen to. There was brown silt all over the trees, hills of collected debris, various Self Defense Forces Japanese Hummers parked about and helicopters sputtered overhead. The scene was surreal.

The principal of the school greeted us and told us we'd be clearing out the washed up and knocked over items in the metal and wood shops first. He told us to follow the instructions of the teachers from the school and to be careful with sharp items that might hurt us. We were all teachers from different schools, but we gelled as a unit pretty quickly. There were shifts of 20 minutes each with a 5 minute break in between. We were told to work only during those shifts and to stop, rest and drink lots of fluids during the breaks. As with many things in Japan, this was precisely scheduled and organized.

We continued on to other rooms until the morning was finished and then we were asked to stop and return to our schools. The principal thanked us all profusely and bowed when we left for our parked cars. By the way, the school's field was filled with a three or four storied mountain of debris and trash that we had been told had already been reduced from over the previous weekend. The trash and other items seem to endlessly gather in these piles all over the area. People who had evacuated were in another part of the town in a local elementary school gym. Yet, somehow, they kept trying to live their lives again, making the best out of what little hope they had left.

It was heart-breaking to see all of this. The putrid smell of rotten river water caught in the wooden furniture and soaked up in the drawers of those industrial arts rooms was surprisingly strong and seeped in every little crevice. If you could ignore it for a little while, you would revile it soon enough before the next break. And the day's sweltering heat increased by the hour, upwards of 38 degrees Celcius　(100 degrees Fahrenheit), which is probably why they only had morning shifts each day for clean-up volunteers.

I tried to capture these images in the 4-koma manga above. The word for this September's English challenge is "volunteer," first as a verb, then as a noun. We must take action to help one another out, especially in dire times. I want the students to understand this basic tenant of humanity.