2011-05-27, Day 8

7:05
A lot of new people arrived and the bus is crowded. I'll miss my own two seats but next to Ruben it (at least) doesn't get cold ^^
And it's good that we are so many again, so we can clean a bigger area.
Yesterday night we had our own kind of bye-bye party since it is our last night here. After dinner we'll go on the bus.
Our last day promises to be cloudy...

The guys seem to be in a happy mood. It’s the last day… There seems to be a something indefinable between the 12 of us who stayed over the week. I can’t describe it, maybe I can later…

9:15

For the last time we requested tools in the volunteer center. I really don’t want to leave…

16:30

Today we were assigned for rice fields again. It was strange. I really feel in charge of the new volunteers, like I should give everything to them I learnt during the past week. Already in the bus on our way to the assigned area, I tried to make the two Japanese girls in front of us feel better about what they would see soon. So I told them, that we are requested from survivors and the personal things we will find are not from dead people, they shouldn’t worry. Ruben was whispering later that this wouldn’t be true since the tsunami of course moved a lot of things to different places. But if my little lie makes the girls feel better then it was worth it. We had the same strange situation when we arrived. The new people would be silent and the others would try to cheer them up. I hope they were as thankful as I was on the first day… It’s really impossible to let those things come too close: I remember the first day and how horrible I felt… But those things have to be done by somebody and I am really happy that I could be one of them at least for a few days…

The work was good. The temperature decreased and even though the sun was shining a lot it wasn’t as hot as the days before. We tried to give the new people a kind of orientation since most of them were unsure of what to do and how to do the things. I was surprised how many of them were fluent in English, with the Japanese in our group it was mostly just possible to talk in Japanese.

The farmer we were helping out was really a tough guy, instead of putting burnable and not-burnable collections close to the street; we would burn the burnable things on the field. Finally we had our tent camp fire…  even though it was quite different than I imagined :)

21:10

We just left the camp… OmG, I am really sad… I will miss them all so much. I would have never thought we would grow into such a strong community. I hope I’ll see them all again. The ones who were with us all the time but also the new ones. I don’t want to go… How can we just return to normal life after all this???