Watch where you walk!!

Last week we drove through several of the towns on the coast in Tohoku. We visited the volunteer shelter in Minami Sanriku where we found out that ony 2 percent of the homes in the town now have water.  Huge sections of the town are nothing but a pile of rubble. The debris lines the banks of the small rivers for kilometers. The pine trees on the hills are brown where the salt water washed over them. Cars, trucks, houses, roads, factories are all twisted together into a huge pile of twisted metal and splintered wood. The smell turns your stomach if you roll down your car window. Yet, the people who survived and live in the town and the volunteers who come, the children who walk to school smell this every day.

Although the number of people in the evacuation centers continues to decline form the original 500,000 and the goal is to have everyone out by mid August, today there are still 90,000 people still in the centers which are scattered over several prefectures. Volunteers go there to listen, to massage the feet of the old people, to sing and entertain. Christians share the love of Jesus and his gift of salvation. The people living in the shelters have nothing to do and are eager to have reading material, so they are given Manga Life of Christ, tracts, and other Christian literature.

Tomorrow a team from Texas arrives to go to the peninsula south of Ishinomaki to minister to the people there. A team from Tennessee was here last week and worked in Iwate. The disaster relief point persons on the ground visited different volunteer centers this past week and talked with other Christian organizations in both Iwate and Miyagi. Join us in praying for God to lead us to those whom He has for us to help and especially to those who are falling through the cracks, to those who still do not have the basic necessities being met.