一般財団法人　連帯　東北・西南　RENTAI　TOHOKU-SEINAN

On Sunday, April 27^th, we provided Tomodachi Curry® at the Temporary Housing Complex in Kahoku Sandanbashiri, Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture and enjoyed a pleasant time talking with the residents.

A number of residents of this temporary housing complex lived near Okawa Elementary School where a number of students were lost due to the tsunami, and our second event here came out of our relationship with Mr. Takeyama who also lost his family in this area.

In our previous event we had a volunteer Chinese chef in our team, so we cooked and provided Chinese dishes. This time we did everything at the venue in the meeting space in the temporary housing, starting with the very first preparation in the morning, and asked the residents to help us. Our purpose was to encourage friendly conversations with the residents from the preparation stage. The residents began helping us from around 8 a.m., and we were happy to have been able to chat with them by the time we took a break.

We asked the residents to continue helping us after we started to cook, with our staff Tahir explaining the procedure. Just frying the onions takes almost an hour and is a much harder work than one might imagine, so we asked the residents to take turns with the cooking.

Tomodachi Curry® was finally ready before noon. Our objective for this event was for everyone to enjoy preparing the curry, and eating and talking with the others in the meeting space, so we limited providing the curry to those who were able to eat at the meeting space. We were very sorry to ask not to take the curry if they wished to eat in their private rooms. However, we sincerely wish everyone to understand that our hope was to have more people come to the meeting space and enjoy talking with others while eating the curry.

We asked some other guests to join us at the meeting space: Mr. Takahiro Inomata, the Executive Director of the Minamisanriku Town Council of Social Welfare, and Mr. Mitsuru Hatakeyama, the Director of Okago Christian Resource Center, both of whom gave lectures at the Symposium held on March 11th, Dr. Kenichi Shoji, the Administrative Director of Shoji Naika Ichoka who assisted us when we donated the Angel Statue at the school ground site of Okawa Elementary School, and Dr. Takayuki Chida, and the Director of Kawasaki Family Clinic from whom we have been renting the office since the beginning of our activities.

We heard that the construction of permanent houses has been delayed again, and the residents would have to wait until 2017. The news left a strong impression on us and it hurt us to think of what the residents would have to continue to bear with.

We sincerely wish the best for the residents at the Temporary Housing Complex in Kahoku Sandanbashiri.