Respite - Sendai to Tono - Friday 4/22

Today the team was finally able to catch a bit of rest.  Had a late breakfast, did some laundry, and got caught up on email.  Then we packed our stuff in the van and drove 3 and a half hours north to the city of Tono (between Morioka and the eastern coast).

We arrived at the CRASH base there and met the current base staff: Jill Davidson, the coordinator, Maki Suzuki (?), and Christina Copeland.  Jill is an MK from Japan who has lived in Seattle, was recently working as a nurse in Alaska, and virtually dropped everything there to come help with CRASH.  Maki is from Nagano, but recently was living in Tokyo, and had been in Tono a week.  Christina also had been here a week, is an MK (I knew her folks in Japan before they were married - small world), is totally fluent in Japanese and English, and after college grad last year had come back to Hiroshima to work with her folks in a coffee house outreach.

Jill (r) served us a delicious lamb supper

They treated us to a "home-cooked" meal of lamb and rice, an flavorful way to start Easter weekend.  We're using our sleeping bags on futon mattresses here, and I'm enjoying it pretty well.

PS: we've been having 1 or 2 aftershocks each night, including one 5 mag jolt that woke us all up...