I left.
I gave warning that I was leaving, but nevertheless, I left. I left a full 12 days before I was supposed to.
The house is a disaster. Almost nothing is organized. I can't find the right cat food or cat litter half the time. I spent my time wading through piles of stuff that I and the other volunteers had pulled out of bins and shelves and corners, things that needed to be washed and aired out or just thrown away because of their moldy or mildew-y sate.
The atmosphere in the house is one of defeat. No one feels like they can do their job right, nor well. Every act of cleaning results in another act of cleaning. Want to organize the dishes? First you have to empty out the shelves full of other stuff. Then you clean the shelves and put the dishes away. Now you have another pile of stuff. Find a place for it; but first you have to clean that out and remove the stuff there. Okay, organized. Now there's another new pile of stuff to find an organized place for. It's endless. I spent almost 20 days there and I can tell you, it is endless.
There is physically no where else for anything to go. I could go on and on and on about all the useless items in that house, and all the strange places I've found them. We have trash days but there is so much trash. And a lot of it wouldn't be, if people had organized or someone had routinely checked in and made sure there was a system in place.
Hardest of all is that there is no solid system in place for anything. Not dishes, not laundry, not personal items, not even who gets what bed. Speaking of beds, four available beds are shoved in a corner of the living room (one bunk, two flat) and all within six inches of each other. What strangers are going to sleep crammed together with no privacy? And even the girls who had been in the house for seven months knew where the bedsheets were (not any of them) until I came and spent my first week going through all the drawers and donation bags and doing loads upon loads of laundry.
Apparently the local community thinks the place is an abandoned "gomiyashiki," which basically translates to "trash house."
I don't know how the place got to be like this. People say that it was fine eight months ago. Maybe it was. Maybe it went downhill in the last eight months, or maybe it's been going downhill for a while and nobody noticed because people's standards for cleanliness were low.
I think one problem is that people don't think of it as their home, and so they forget that they need to take responsibility to clean up after themselves and keep the place going by leaving it better than they found it. There's no hotel staff to strip their beds and wash their sheets and clean up the litter they leave and toss all their trash. There's just the next batch of volunteers, and if they don't clean up but still leave their own mess, and if the next group fails to clean up and leaves their own mess...
At least I stripped down my own damn bed and put the sheets in the laundry before I left. I also cleaned my extra food out of the fridge.
Nobody can stay sane in that house. The sheer weight of all the work that has to be done, and the lack of a systematic way to accomplish it, married with the confusion a lot of people suffer when they arrive and find the situation drastically different than what they expected (plus a lot of people are just visiting and they don't know how Japan works, just no idea about food or which cleaner to use or how trash works or anything) is what drives people crazy and makes them leave. There's nobody in the house with enough morale to keep everyone going. I tried to be the morale, to be the answer to all questions about the house and Japan, and on Friday, I cracked. I just broke down crying and I couldn't stop, I cried myself to sleep and woke up ready to cry again. I hid from everyone all Saturday, read fanfic and watched Youtube and scrolled endlessly through Tumblr. On Sunday I spent five hours lying in bed, not quite sleeping, just sort of unable to operate. I couldn't talk to anyone until Monday evening.
Suffice to say, that house is a mess, I can't be the glue that holds a mess that big together.
It's Tuesday, and I'm in a little AirBnB apartment in Koriyama, about 40 minutes away by train. I'll go back up to the shelter on Thursday and greet the new volunteers, since they'll need a major orientation into the unfortunate situation they've inherited.
I cried so much on the train ride to Koriyama. I feel like I let everyone down and abandoned the volunteers and the animals. I think Chacha, the dog that I bonded with most, knew that I was leaving, and I think I made him sad. I miss him so much. I can't adopt him, because he's over the size limit for my new apartment and my job is so busy that I'd never be around to take care of him properly, and also it's important that he be adopted with his friend Addy, because she kind of needs his emotional support. But I feel like he's mine, and I feel like I spent so much time loving him only to let him down, and I feel like shit, and it's all because of that fucking house that takes good, hard-working, animal-loving people and breaks them.
I'm so mad and I'm so sad. I don't care if I disappoint people, but I let down a dog. I feel like a piece of shit.
I've got alcohol and an empty apartment and I've never felt more tired, lonely, and powerless.
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