We can't replace what's lost but we can help restore It (hopefully).

In my last post, I remembered my friends in Japan, and prayed that they were okay.  It had been too many years that were full of too many stories they should have heard, too many parties they should have attended, and too many moments that would have loved their company.  Still, the years stuttered by.  I've noticed they become more fluid, gathering speed as they amass.  I wish that wasn't the case.

I'm so relieved to learn that both Sachi and Masa are happy and healthy and raising families far from the destruction unleashed by the March 11 quake and tsunami.  And I'm happy the distance that time wedged between us collapsed as quickly a moment.  And maybe it was only just a moment after all.

Although my friends are okay, the friends of many others are not.  The families of others are not.  Please take a moment to donate anything you can to the recovery efforts.  There are still 500,000 people without homes.  That means half a million people without the clothes in their closets, the food in their cupboards, the keepsakes from happier times and mementos of loved ones who've passed, the bundles of letters, the albums of photos, the stacks of read books and walls of painted memories.  For all these people, the anchors we drop to secure our pasts have been cut.  They'll be fine, thankfully.  But life, for them, has been interrupted.

And then there are those who remain missing or have died.  Almost 10,000 are confirmed dead and another 12,000 are missing.  When I was a little girl, maybe 7 years old, I read about 250 marines killed in Beirut and tried to understand exactly what that meant.  I imagined all the kids in my classroom lining up on the field.  And I added the fourth-graders in the class next door.  Then I added the kindergartners.  That only got me 70 but it was too many already.  I stopped lining up kids in my head because I couldn't bear to imagine 250 of us wiped away from that day, from recess, and dinner with our moms at night, and bike rides back to school in the morning.

I thought about trying to line up groups of people to fathom the loss of 10,000 people in a single, devastating event but I couldn't even start.  Instead, I made a donation, in the hope that the recovery and reconstruction in Japan will be quick, and that people will rise from the suffering, and that they will begin to find new mementos and keepsakes to remind them of their hopes for the future.

From the U.S., you can make easy donations of $10 to several organizations by text as follows:

• American Red Cross: text REDCROSS to 90999  
• Save the Children: text JAPAN to 20222
• Mercy Corps: text MERCY to 25383

The mobile giving campaign of American Red Cross is organized by the mGive Foundation.  The campaigns for Save the Children and Mercy Corps is organized by Mobile Giving.

From New Zealand, the NZ Red Cross has started a campaign to collect donations to benefit the Japanese Red Cross.  You may consider donating to both the Japan relief efforts as well as the continuing work of the NZ Red Cross in Christchurch.