As you may have heard on the news, Kyoto was hit by a typhoon not too long ago and it affected a lot of people. 260,000 people were forced to evacuate and wait until the typhoon had passed.
As you can imagine a storm that had winds of over 100 mph could do some damage. In the days after the storm there were a lot of people/groups that volunteered to help out and our team was one of them.
I think there were different volunteer stations in different cities around the prefecture (state) of Kyoto (as Kyoto is a prefecture/state as well as a city) and we went and registered there. Then after a short wait we were off to where we were going to help.
A farmer on the outside of one of the local towns had a mudslide go over a road on his property that separated the back of his farm (or another small village - it was hard to understand with the translation difference). So we were all given shovels and gloves, hopped in some vehicles and headed to the farmers land to work. We were working on the side of a rice paddy and had a lot of dirt to clear. There must have been 20 of us working on this one area and it took us a number of hours to shovel all the dirt into the back of small trucks or wheelbarrows and make the road passable again.
It was definitely a good workout, digging and moving the dirt all day, but more importantly it was a good thing to do. We were able to help out the farmer who really needed it. Otherwise, he would have probably spent weeks clearing the mess up, valuable time he could be using doing something else.
(Filling the road/potholes with the dirt that took from the landslide pile)
As you can imagine a storm that had winds of over 100 mph could do some damage. In the days after the storm there were a lot of people/groups that volunteered to help out and our team was one of them.
I think there were different volunteer stations in different cities around the prefecture (state) of Kyoto (as Kyoto is a prefecture/state as well as a city) and we went and registered there. Then after a short wait we were off to where we were going to help.
A farmer on the outside of one of the local towns had a mudslide go over a road on his property that separated the back of his farm (or another small village - it was hard to understand with the translation difference). So we were all given shovels and gloves, hopped in some vehicles and headed to the farmers land to work. We were working on the side of a rice paddy and had a lot of dirt to clear. There must have been 20 of us working on this one area and it took us a number of hours to shovel all the dirt into the back of small trucks or wheelbarrows and make the road passable again.
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