Third Day

Yesterday morning was the first time our team members slept in. Looks like we're all settled! We started the day with a prayer meeting, sharing praises and requests to each other. It made me really thankful to God for this opportunity to partner with the Be One team and share life with the locals here. Immediately afterwards, we visited the Nozomi Project site. The Nozomi Project is a social enterprise that takes in broken pottery and makes jewelry for sell. We got to meet the employees, watch the process, and listen to some of their technical needs. 

This is where the local pottery gets cleaned and finished into jewelry. There's a team of 3 local women all with tragic yet amazing stories of recovery from the tsunami and their ventures of starting this jewelry business. From the story told to us, the first few months at Nozomi were full of tears from the pain and loss yet joy for the hope in the future in midst of a lot of pottery restoration.

Here's an image of the final finish.

 

A lot of Japanese pottery is blue and white, which ended up becoming the main theme for the Nozomi Project. Their vision for the past few years have been beauty from the brokenness which can definitely be seen not only in their jewelry but their experience.



This is a picture of the grinding process, which happens right before it is sent to the finishing room. Gotta make sure no one gets hurt wearing their jewelry!!

After we went through the tour of their jewelry process, they asked us to give them some technical training for their shopify site, and boy was that difficult!! The problem with teaching web dev is that so much of it is the experience of knowing the context of a problem to provide the correct solution or solutions. In other words, there was no way we could teach them how to re-vamp their site in that short amount of time. Our designer though really wanted to offer them a more moon look to their website, which I would implement. We have a pretty big project ahead of us, and I'm a little concerned with our time constraints. But if there's someone that can do it, it's definitely us :)

After meeting and talking of ways we can revamp their site, our team went back to our base, and Paul and I started working on their site. We've hit some big parts on their navigation and will be looking to work on their site's flow next.

Prayer requests:
It definitely doesn't feel like I'm on vacation in Japan ;) yesterday, I put in about 13 hours of work, and I foresee this happening for the majority of the trip. Today, I woke up pretty tired, dehydrated, and congested. Please be praying for supernatural energy so I can finish the work we need to do on this site. Please also be praying for our team in this way.

Blessings from Ishinomaki!!