azamiryou
Member
First, please allow me to give you a little background. If you want to get right to the meat of this post, please skip ahead a few paragraphs to the one that starts with "The upshot is".
As some of you may remember, I lived in Iwate, Japan from 2007-2009. Iwate was hit really hard by the tsunami after the March 11 earthquake. I still have many friends in that area (luckily, none of my friends ended up as casualties, though some lost their own friends and family).
I'm also a model railroader (with a focus on Japanese trains), and president of the Japan Rail Modelers of Washington, DC model railroad club, aka JRM. While I was in Japan, I was a member of the Iwate Rail Modelers' Circle club (IRC), and at the time of my return to the US, the two clubs entered a sister club relationship.
After the earthquake, JRM members wanted to do something to help. In the disaster, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes, and lost all their material possessions. One of our members talked about when he was a kid and lost everything in a house fire, and the first new toys he got after that left a big impression on him. In a similar way, I met an old rice farmer in Japan whose lifelong positive image of the US was formed when an American soldier gave him candy after WW2.
Having a sister club in the disaster area gave us a unique opportunity to help the kids in Japan and give them such a lifelong impression of goodwill from other nations.
The upshot is: we decided to create Omocha Express, a charity to buy toys for the kids in Japan who lost everything. The project is a partnership between JRM, IRC, and the Sanriku Railway company, a small coastal railroad in Iwate that lost about 75% of its infrastructure in the tsunami. Here's how it works:
Please check out the Omocha Express website and help us spread the word. Of course, if you are so moved, we'd also appreciate a small donation. (We'd rather get many small donations than a few big ones, because we want to show that a lot of people care.)
You can also find us on Facebook.
Thanks for reading!
As some of you may remember, I lived in Iwate, Japan from 2007-2009. Iwate was hit really hard by the tsunami after the March 11 earthquake. I still have many friends in that area (luckily, none of my friends ended up as casualties, though some lost their own friends and family).
I'm also a model railroader (with a focus on Japanese trains), and president of the Japan Rail Modelers of Washington, DC model railroad club, aka JRM. While I was in Japan, I was a member of the Iwate Rail Modelers' Circle club (IRC), and at the time of my return to the US, the two clubs entered a sister club relationship.
After the earthquake, JRM members wanted to do something to help. In the disaster, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes, and lost all their material possessions. One of our members talked about when he was a kid and lost everything in a house fire, and the first new toys he got after that left a big impression on him. In a similar way, I met an old rice farmer in Japan whose lifelong positive image of the US was formed when an American soldier gave him candy after WW2.
Having a sister club in the disaster area gave us a unique opportunity to help the kids in Japan and give them such a lifelong impression of goodwill from other nations.
The upshot is: we decided to create Omocha Express, a charity to buy toys for the kids in Japan who lost everything. The project is a partnership between JRM, IRC, and the Sanriku Railway company, a small coastal railroad in Iwate that lost about 75% of its infrastructure in the tsunami. Here's how it works:
- JRM collects donations.
- IRC uses the money to buy toys for the kids, and distributes the toys.
- Sanriku Rwy finds the kids who need the toys through day-cares and schools in their operating area.
Please check out the Omocha Express website and help us spread the word. Of course, if you are so moved, we'd also appreciate a small donation. (We'd rather get many small donations than a few big ones, because we want to show that a lot of people care.)
You can also find us on Facebook.
Thanks for reading!
