Bleu Dress Jes: Ishinomaki {part2}

After a few days of fun it was time to get dirty! We spent most of the week working on an apartment complex.

When we started on this room, there was about a foot of debris that needed to be sorted through {large pieces need to be seperated...more on that later} and put into bags to be taken to one of the many dumps in town.

We found lots of toys; stuffed animals, puzzle pieces, comic books, legos, etc. so we assumed the room belonged to a child.

We were later told the story of the family who used to live in this apartment. They heard the warning sirens, had gathered a few necessities and were getting into their car when a neighbor told them that there was too much traffic and they would never make it out in time. The family, and some of the neighbors, went by foot to a building that was tall enough to be out of harms way and rode out the tsunami there. They are all now living safely in Sendai.

We gave blood & sweat {no tears, but there were a few moments when that was a possibility!} to that room and had it almost ready for the professionals to redo it by the end of the week!

We started the next day looking like a chain gang {minus the orange jumpsuits} digging a ditch at the park so the landscapers could plant some trees/bushes

From there I went on a few dump runs. At the work site, we'd load the truck with as much as it could hold then drive it to one of the many dumps in the area where it had to be separated into very specific piles

We paused for a brief minute to pose for a photo with a few of the workers at the wood dump site.

By the end of the week, we had turned this...

into this

and this

into this

Our last day a few of us were blessed to work on a project that I am very excited about! A group of local single mom's have started a project called Shards of Hope. They are taking broken pieces of pottery found among the debris and turning it into beautiful jewelry.