SEQUIM — Tom Schaafsma, who has been honored as former Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year and a Clallam County Community Service Award recipient, will take his years of volunteer experience Saturday to Sendai, Japan, where he will help earthquake and tsunami survivors.
Schaafsma is a registered volunteer with the international ShelterBox USA Response Team, a major Sequim Sunrise Rotary cause, and will join the response team in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, to help distribute 5,000 ShelterBox tents.
He has been assigned to a two-week mission.
“There’s a certain amount of honor to be able to respond,” said Schaafsma, 62, a retired carpenter.
This will be his sixth ShelterBox USA deployment.
As a member of the ShelterBox response team, trained for deployment to towns and cities, Schaafsma has volunteered in earthquake-stricken Peru, Mexico after Hurricane Jimena and Honduras following major floods.
After the Haiti earthquake, Schaafsma and the rest of his eight-member response team lived in tents beside the University of Miami’s field hospital, where the daily patient count was in the hundreds.
Schaafsma and other response team volunteers will set up ShelterBox tents in the area hit March 11 by a magnitude 9.0 quake, followed by a powerful tsunami that literally wiped many Sendai-area communities off the map, leaving many homeless in its devastating wake.
The tidal wave swept up to six miles inland on Japan’s northeast coat.
Schaafsma said he has learned that about 90 percent of the damage came from the tsunami, with the quake causing the remainder.
The Japanese National Police Agency has officially confirmed 12,431 deaths, 2,869 injured and 15,153 people missing across 18 prefectures, as well as more than 125,000 buildings damaged or destroyed.
While Haiti, a Third World country, received some 27,000 ShelterBox units, Schaafsma said Japan, a highly industrialized nation, is far more able to aid its own people and needs fewer ShelterBox units.
“Japan is a little different animal,” he explained.
“Normally, we deploy to Third World countries, but under the circumstances, we are responding to Japan.”
Schaafsma said he suspects the majority of the rescue mission will be completed by the time he arrives in Sendai, adding that he expects to see a great deal of cleanup work
“People there are living in cars and doing whatever they have to do to survive,” he said.
“It is still cold there. They were getting snow there last week.”
Schaafsma said the team will help people outside of Sendai’s radioactive safety zone surrounding the Fukushima nuclear power plants.
He isn’t concerned about exposure to radiation, he said.
“The media here has way overblown that issue from [Japan’s] perspective,” Schaafsma said.
Schaafsma’s trip to Japan comes as a ShelterBox tent will be displayed Saturday night at the 90th anniversary party of the Port Angeles Rotary Club, said Jim Pickett, a Sequim Sunrise Rotary ShelterBox project leader.
(See box at right)
A complete box, with a 10-person tent and other survival equipment, costs $1,000.
Those interested in making a contribution in any amount may contact a member of any of the four Rotary Clubs in Clallam County or receive more information by emailing Pickett at jpick@wavecable.com or phoning 360-681-4830.
Since its inception in 2000, ShelterBox, www.shelterboxusa.org, has provided shelter and dignity to survivors after more than 140 disasters in more than 70 countries.
ShelterBox instantly responds to earthquakes, volcanos, floods, hurricanes, cyclones, tsunamis or conflicts by delivering boxes of aid.
Schaafsma also has worked alongside fellow Rotarian Pickett to raise money for ShelterBox through presentations across the Pacific Northwest.
The pair have been recognized as the top Rotary fundraisers for ShelterBox, bringing in thousands of dollars in donations to pay for crates to be shipped to disaster-stricken places around the globe.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
