IMS sends hope and cranes to Japan

LAKEVILLE — Students at the Indian Mountain School have patiently folded 1,000 paper cranes as a gesture of concern and compassion for those injured, displaced and lost in the series of earthquake, tsunami and radiation disasters that struck Japan in March.The thousand cranes have now been carefully put on display in the school. The folding of cranes comes from “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes,” a 1977 children’s book by Eleanor Coerr about a girl, Sadako Sasaki, who lived through the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 but later developed leukemia.Sadako spent the rest of her life creating origami cranes, acting on a Japanese tradition that holds that creating a thousand paper cranes entitles the maker to a wish.Sadako died after making 644 cranes, but the tradition has become a part of peace ceremonies and education worldwide.Two of the IMS students are Japanese and were in Japan when the earthquake struck. Indian Mountain has students from kindergarten to grade nine, and many are foreign students who live on campus. Fuko Chiba, 15, and in the ninth grade, said she lives in Yokohama. Her family was unhurt, she said, but she could not get in touch with her father for a day during the emergency.She added that when the quake hit, she was alone and simply stayed in her room.“Everything was shaking.”Aya Maeda, 16, and also in the ninth grade, is from Tokyo. When the shaking started, he was with a friend, and they crawled under a table.Later on, with transit systems and communications shut down, his friend stayed the night.He said his main concern now is the danger from radiation from the damaged nuclear power plant.Both Japanese students said they did not believe the Japanese government was being entirely honest about the radiation problem. “They are trying to avoid panic,” Aya said.Fuko said she believed the authorities were concentrating on clearing up the tsunami damage at least partly as a way to distract attention from the radiation.Lily Schapp, 13, an eighth-grader from North Canaan, found herself in charge of stringing the cranes together in groups of 25. Borrowing an idea from the Internet, she obtained plastic coffee stirrers from the school kitchen and used them to attach the cranes to each other.Sheryl Knapp, who along with Cecilia Marshall runs the IMS community service program, said the going was slow at first, but with help from the Japanese students (and other students from Asia) the crane-making took off. Fuko said that Lily got good enough to teach others.The cranes will be shipped to a hospital in Japan.Knapp said the crane project was a great success, not least for the Japanese students, who are, of course, worried about their families and friends.Combined with sales of commemorative bracelets (designed by Aya’s mother), the school will offer both symbolic and material support.