February Sycamore Tree

Over the past 2 years, one of the people that I have been fortunate to get to know so many different people from so many different backgrounds. One person made me particularly nervous when I first met him because I was suddenly asked if I would be willing to help him eat dinner. A-san was born with cerebral palsy and relies on the use of a wheelchair for mobility. He moved to Sendai from Tokyo 20 years ago after the completion of Ari no mamasha, a group living facility that allows people like A-san to live independently. Every Friday night at the student/youth center, A-san leads a workshop for the Japan Overseas Christian Services (JOCS) non-profit group which raises money to send doctors and medical aid to countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Ari no mamasha is outside of Sendai city and so it’s difficult for the people who live there to travel into the downtown area; a small handful that do usually travel by bus or taxi. In Sendai city there is one bus that has a lift for wheelchairs and this bus makes one single trip a day from Ari no mamasha to Sendai and one trip back and must be reserved in advance. Taxis are available but also limited and expensive. A-san has often said that his life would be completely impossible without humility and trust. An action like taking a drink of water or using the toilet might require the assistance of a complete stranger. So, after several conversations along this theme over dinners on Friday night we decided to host a workshop about understanding life from A-san’s perspective.

During dinner, we sometimes ask students and those present to help A-san with meals. Like the first time I was asked to help, this does cause some discomfort or nervousness. Most young people have never encountered someone with cerebral palsy before and there have been students in the past who have gotten upset because they felt like they were the only ones that were willing to help every time. Of course this is not the purpose for inviting A-san and others to participate in our activities. But, we do feel that helping him and others like him is one of the small things we can do in our ministry when there are so few public resources available in the community.

Dinner featured spaghetti with tomato sauce. The catch was, no one was allowed to use their arms, each person had to ask their neighbor to help them with their meal. It’s an exercise in patience because you must wait for your partner to roll the noodles onto a fork, place those noodles on a spoon, and then serve this to you. And, because everyone was doing the same exercise, it left no room for anyone to be uncomfortable or feel left out. We were having too much fun talking and watching other people while we waited for our partner. After dinner, we used blindfolds to experience blindness, special headphones to experience deafness, and even took turns pushing and being pushed in a wheelchair.

I’ve learned so much from people like A-san about trust, optimism, and life in general over these past two years and so I really especially enjoyed sharing this time with him and other members of the student center.