Activity report by Ms. M, who participated in September.

The volunteer program in Kesennuma is conducted in one-week cycles, and this is the tenth cycle. The number of participants has been gradually increasing, with approximately 40 students taking part this time. By renting a community center in Karakuwa and staying there for a week, the volunteers are able to directly hear about the current situation in the area and the voices of the local residents, which is difficult to grasp with one-off volunteer activities, allowing them to work with a deeper understanding.

My volunteer work mainly involved cleaning up photographs washed away by the tsunami and removing rubble. The photograph cleaning took place in the gymnasium next to the community center where I was staying. Approximately 1 million photographs, enough to fill 20,000 albums, were on display there, and people looking for their photos could freely enter and exit the gymnasium. There, I carefully washed the mud and oil off the large number of photographs that had been recovered, dried them, and put them back into albums. The photographs captured important moments in the lives of the people in them, such as birthdays and weddings, and it made me realize once again the immense scale of the tsunami's damage. Also, while I was working, I witnessed several albums being returned to their owners, which made me appreciate the importance of the painstaking work of washing each photograph one by one.

During the debris removal, we cleared away roof tiles, mud, and garbage left behind after houses were demolished by the tsunami. Among the mud and garbage were many things that made it clear that people had indeed lived there, such as pieces of broken dishes and unopened canned goods. In the afternoon, as the sea flooded the area, what had been a road just moments before was submerged in seawater.

In addition to students from Tohoku Gakuin, students from many other prefectures, including Tokyo, Nagoya, and Fukuoka, also participated as volunteers. Interacting with them allowed me to share various opinions on the earthquake and my thoughts on volunteering, which was a great opportunity to broaden my own perspective.