Pro Surfer Jon Rose on recent trip to Japan
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SoCal surfer/activist Jon Rose explains of his recent trip to Japan. “This will be a 10- to 20-year rebuilding process. You’re not talking about one isolated place, it’s 200 miles of coastal towns wiped out. No electricity, no sanitation, nothing — they’re just trying to get the roads back. There’s debris everywhere, it looks like a giant landfill.”
Rose is no stranger to disaster zones. Since starting Waves for Water in 2009 after the tsunami hit the Mentawais, he’s since traveled around the world to various disaster areas — from Haiti to Chile to Pakistan — offering up filters to create clean drinking water for victims of natural disasters.
He spent last week traveling around northern Japan giving out filters to those in need on the perimeter of where the tsunami hit — and there was no shortage of people in need.
“We’d be driving around in the van and see people camped out in their driveway boiling water for drinking,” Rose says. “They’d have to walk to the nearest pond, and bring it back and boil it.”
Rose, former pro surfer Danny Melhado, W4W Executive Director Christian Troy and local surfer/musician/translator/guide Toruman would walk up the driveway and explain they were volunteers and had filters to donate.
Rose explains: “We’d say, ‘We know you have a million needs right now, but we can help with one of them. You don’t need to boil your water anymore — and you can use that time to focus on other needs.’ We’d show ‘em how to use the filters, and they were stoked. It was kinda like guerilla humanitarianism.”
The crew spent the week on the perimeter of where the tsunami hit. “They’re the ones kinda living in the shadows,” explains Rose. “They can’t go to the government shelters, ’cause they still have their houses — but they don’t have anything else. It was important to reach out to them.”
All up, the expedition gave out 150 water filters, which will give 15,000 people clean drinking water. “Unlike most of the places we go, Japan is very first world, so they just need the filters till their water gets turned back on,” said Rose. “We told ‘em to hang onto ‘em in case of emergencies. Hopefully they won’t need ‘em again.”
For more on Waves for Water, check out wavesforwater.org.
