August 18, 2008

Greetings from Tokyo, Japan.

The Japanese fiscal year starts in April, and most of changes in organizations or institutions are supposed to be complete by the end of March. At HELP, Asian Women's Shelter, however, changes came slowly after spring arrived.

As of July 1, 2008, HELP has eight regular staff members: one full-time worker who has been working as a housemother for almost two decades; one part-time accountant, and six part-time case workers. (Some “part-time” staff members work five days a week, but don’t have the same social benefits as full-time workers.) We lost a very capable and creative person, our chief caseworker, at the end of April. She was our only full-time case worker. She felt that she needed to recharge herself spiritually.

We used to have two housemothers, but one resigned at the end of March due to illness. To fill her job, there are several contingent staff for cooking and night duty when our regular housemother is not on duty (three days and four nights or four days and three nights), and volunteers who help our in housekeeping—sorting out and arranging donated clothes, cleaning vacated rooms, etc.

On Saturdays, caseworkers take turns being on duty. The board decided not to hire a new housemother or another full-time caseworker for financial reasons. Until the end of June, we had an acting part-time director, but she was suddenly hospitalized with a pulmonary embolism and resigned. She was already overworked under understaffed situations, trying to find people to fill the positions of cook and be on night duty besides carrying out her work as a director and a as the only caseworker who can help Spanish-speaking people.

Please do remember HELP in your prayers, as we have been going through these difficult times.

HELP can accommodate four families and five single women now. At the moment, we have three families, all non-Japanese domestic violence (DV) survivors. All of them have children (three girls and one boy). We also have a 16 year old Filipino-Japanese girl, who seems to have been sold by her mother to an agent in Philippines to work in Japan, and two women, a young Filipina and an 82-year old Japanese, who had to leave wherever they had been living. They have mental problems, but are not sick enough to be hospitalized and yet not well enough to adapt to social life. We also have a Japanese woman in her forties who had been sleeping in a park, trying to find a job. We understand that she is divorced and her three children live with her ex-husband, not far from Tokyo.

All of the non-Japanese residents need support in their native language when they discuss important matters with government social workers—such as the legal regulations as welfare recipients—and when they go to the immigration office or their embassy, visit a hospital or a police station.  Caseworkers, especially Thai-, Tagalog-, and Spanish-speaking caseworkers, go with these residents wherever they have to go to support and protect them.

Since HELP is an emergency shelter, the limit for each person’s stay is two weeks, but the average length of stay of non-Japanese residents is about a month because it takes time to complete their legal status to stay in Japan if they don’t have a passport, visa, or alien registration card, and to find non-Japanese friendly apartments.

We have a morning meeting at 9:30 a.m. and a closing meeting in the evening  (around 6:00 p.m.) to exchange detailed information about each resident.

Our major concern now is the behavior of a 7-year-old girl. Her mother had been physically and sexually abused in front of the children. We decided to get professional opinions from a child counselor who comes to help us whenever we need her advice. The most welcome topic of one of our daily meetings is when a new resident—an adult or child—who arrived looking tense, tired, and unhappy, starts smiling, singing, or laughing.

After a few days with us, they regain their own strength to remember that they deserve to be happy.

To all these qualities add love, which binds all things together in perfect unity.
- Col. 3: 14

Thank you for your continued concern about our work at HELP Asian Women's Shelter.

Grace in Christ,

Yukiko Altman

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 104