Flying Bento Box

From March 2nd to March 31, 2012, I volunteered for Peace Boat in Ishinomaki, Miyagi, Japan to help with the relief effort after the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami. One of Peace Boat's projects is in Funakoshi, a small seaside village in the Ogatsu peninsula, north of Ishinomaki.There, volunteers support and help the "Funakoshi ladies" make pendant necklaces and paint pictures on the Ogatsu stones while sitting on the third floor within a partially destroyed school building. These stones hold special meaning as they used to be part of roof tiles of houses that were washed away by the March 11th tsunami. This is a piece of writing from my dream book. It tells of my renewed love for art and painting as a result of the volunteer experiences I encountered in Funakoshi. Additionally, it offers a small window into understanding the human condition, in particular, the Japanese effort to rebuild their lives after the earthquake/tsunami natural disaster. ~~~~~  Frozen in Tim...

06/30/2017 Hello my friend! How are you? I hope you are doing well. I am doing pretty good myself here in Vietnam. Today was my last day volunteering at the Orthopedics and Rehab Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City and I just wanted share with you about what I’ve seen and learned here.             If I were to describe my experience here in one or two words, I would say it is eye-opening. I suppose I’ll need to talk a little about my daily life here in Vietnam you can get a sense of why it was eye-opening. Every day, my alarm rings at 600 in the morning. I get up quiets and tip toe to the bathroom so as not to wake up the other volunteers that shared the room with me. I put on my blue scrubs and dark brown Birkenstock sandals. They aren’t as pretty and feminine as the sandals the nurses at the hospitals wear, but they will do. I grab my bag with about 40,000 Vietnamese Dong—$1.75 in US dollars—more than enough to spend for the da...