Go Team 2!

Louisa and me. I was lucky to have her on my team in Ishinomaki last weekend. Those two-hour bus rides out to Peace Boat's base camp passed very quickly when we were seated next to each other.

A few days after we had returned to Tokyo, she emailed this to me: "I'm looking out my window at the incredible clutter of buildings and antennae and water towers, lightning rods, ventilation ductwork, water pipes, air conditioners, all chockablock (great Tokyo landscape). There are four guys out there on assorted roofs, dressed kind of like you in the picture (above)! I love this view and how I can see, on the exteriors of the buildings, how all the innards work. But it was another thing to see the innards inside out, so to speak, banged up and shredded, and to think of them as, well, dead."

Here's all of Team 2 (there were six teams of 7 total) at the end of our second work day, posing in front of the heap of trash bags we had spent the last several hours filling with toxic gutter slime and contaminated soil from somebody's yard (two other teams worked with us on this).
From right to left: The corporate trainer (Miyuki, Japanese), the Japanese translator (Brendan, American), the seasoned Peace Boat volunteer (Kenta, Japanese, assigned to make sure we didn't hurt ourselves, I imagine - see previous post), the construction firm exec (Adrian, Australian), the business school professor and organizer of this whole weekend (Tish, American), the history professor (Louisa, American), the writer (me, American), and the recruiter (Tomoyo, Japanese). Love all you guys.

And here's the whole lot of us:
It looks like Yoshioka-san, Peace Boat's founding director (front row, second from left, with Kenta sitting to his right) is holding up my chin with his thumb.

Click here to see more photos on Flickr.