August 4, 2011, Thursday

Isaiah 28:16  - Therefore thus says the Lord God, “Behold, I am laying in  Zion a stone, a tested stone, A costly cornerstone for the foundation, firmly placed. He who believes in it will not be disturbed.” NASB

Demolition day! We pulled a fun job today knocking out drywall and tearing off interior paneling from a school and house right next to the garden where we spent our first workday. One structure was a little school, the other was a regular house. First, we wrecked havoc inside the school. I found it extremely satisfying and cathartic to lay waste to the walls with a crowbar and hammer. After the paneling was out, we removed the insulation – all of it was pretty soiled with dried mud. 

After lunch, we moved next door to help clean up the drywall that had been ripped out earlier in the day.  Meggie got her hands on some weapons of mass demolition and unleashed her fury on some of the remaining walls. It was a fearsome scene.

On our drive back to the church, Itou-san was very nice and offered to take us to see Shichigahama. This was a town that was hit extremely hard by the tsunami. Initially, the road jogged through an ordinary neighborhood. Then we took a turn onto a road that slopped gently downhill, and in a blink of an eye, we shifted from a bustling residential area to what used to be a residential area. All the houses in this lower plain were gone, only the foundations remained. The emptiness somehow managed to loom more than any standing building. The whole area was swamped with thick fog, giving the drive a very eery feel. On one street, the last remaining buildings were what used to be two story houses – but the top story was sitting on the ground, completely removed from their foundation and their bottom floor. We drove along the sea wall where it used to be solid pine trees. What trees remained had their foliage stripped off all the way to their uppermost branches. What amazed me was the proximity of relatively undamaged houses and…non-houses. Whether your home was built on a slightly higher berm or not was the difference between having a house to salvage and not having a house at all.

It was a sober drive back to the church.  Through a wall of trees we saw a full lot of wrecked, unclaimed cars. I’m told that these are vehicles the government has not been able to return to their owners, for one reason or another. Even so, in the midst of the devastation, I saw a freshly tilled patch of earth that had been sown with a new crop.