Day Four: 31 March 2011 Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture The final day. Again we split up into two teams: clean-up and cooking. Outside its windy, raining and so cold. The cooking team sets up our kitchen tent in front of the supermarket near the residential area where many people stay in the upstairs level of houses. […]
Day Three: 30 March 2011 Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture Today we all go to the peninsula where lots of villages were washed away by the tsunami. The area near the port has a very strong smell, like something rotten. We stop by a small shelter for about 80 refugees. We give them boxes of long sleeve […]
Day Two: 29 March 2011 Up early again. We split up into two groups. One group will work to clear rubble and help clean up damaged houses and public areas. The second group will cook food for people staying in a junior high school that has been converted into a shelter for about 900 refugees. […]
For more than 10 years, the Japanese student volunteer organization IVUSA has been sending groups of students to India to participate in Embracing the World’s housing projects for the homeless and for disaster refugees. These students participated in projects to build homes for tsunami refugees in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu after the 2004 Indian […]
March 4, Ikundi, Papua New Guinea Eastern Highlands The second leg of Br. Shantamrita Chaitanya’s Melanesian tour was deep in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea. In a historic visit to the remote village of Ikundi, Shantamrita’s plane was the second ever to land on an airstrip that locals have been building by hand […]
It doesn’t matter whether the three dimensions are length, breadth and width as some say, or matter, time and space. We can discern the emergence of the fifth dimension, in the bigger world of Amma. It is so, now in Pune, at the end of program of Mar 2 and 3. In Pune, the cultural […]
14 March 2011 Embracing the World has sent its first group of local volunteers from our Japan Center to Sendai—the major city nearest the epicenter of the earthquake, and hit hard by both the quake (Japan’s worst-ever) and the subsequent tsunami. At Amma’s request, the ETW representatives went to Sendai in order to study the […]
I remember a point in my life when I was about 20 when I realized that the laughter and innocent joy so often present through my youth was appearing less and less in my life. It seems like those days of magic and unlimited possibilities were far behind me. I remember with sadness that I […]
During the program in Ahmedabad, the Additional Chief Secretary Government of Gujarat, RM Patel took a few minutes to share his thoughts about Amma. “I have been working 33 years in government service. I heard about Amma five years ago. My new born granddaughter had a serious heart problem and the doctors told that the […]