Before and After

I want to give you a tangible example of something we've done here.  Myself included, of course.  This is a photo (taken by an All Hands staff member) of a home we cleaned out before we started.

This is after.  The same house.

This is a bunch of us outside the home having a strategy meeting.

The owner if this building is the man in red.  On a different note, the city has come through with heavy machinery and cleared up all of the piles of rubble in front of the houses on both sides of the street.  It's slow-going.  They go about 10 meters per day.  There's that much to remove.

See the house on the right side of the road three down from us?  The tannish/brownish house?  This is another house that the group worked on.  The son of the family, a man in his 30s was in the house when the first wave hit.  He ran upstairs and waited for the water to recede and when it did, he ran down and fled to safety, higher ground to the far right of the photo (out of the picture).  Imagine being in your home when the wave hit.  The man in red, the owner of the home in this photo did the same thing.  He waited out the tsunami on the second floor.  What must go through someone's mind when faced with a real-life life or death situation like that?  For that, I'll muck out houses and interpret stories that make me cry.  Bring it on.