Chronicle - Communications - University of Canterbury

Student VolunteerArmy’s missionto JapanThe scale of the devastationand clean-up job facingJapan in the wake of the11 March earthquake andtsunami leaves a normallyeloquent young studentleader lost for words.“It is hard to describe what you seethere. Lives, homes and villages have justbeen utterly destroyed,” said StudentVolunteer Army (SVA) founder Sam Johnson,who has recently returned from a tripto Japan to set up a Japanese version ofthe SVA.Sam and colleague Jason Pemberton,who helped run the SVA’s mobile dispatchunit, flew to Japan courtesy of Air NewZealand and spent a fortnight in thecountry with the goal of helping establish aself-sufficient volunteer project made up ofuniversity students from the region worsthit by the massive 9.0 earthquake andtsunami that hit Japan’s north-east coast.The SVA was invited to Japan by GlobalDIRT (Disaster Immediate Response Team).Global DIRT spent a couple of days inChristchurch with the SVA following the22 February quake observing the volunteerworkforce in action in the hard-hit easternsuburbs and looking at its managementsystems. Impressed by the organisation’smodel of en masse student volunteering,President Adam Marlatt Facebookmessaged Sam suggesting some SVArepresentatives share some of the lessonsthey had learned as a result of theSeptember and February earthquakes.The first three days of the mission werespent in Tokyo, meeting with other NGOsand student contacts at Waseda University,with which the University of Canterburyhas enjoyed an exchange programmesince 2001.6