Friday: A day in the life of YouMeWe NPO

Friday

Life Connection: Symposium in Nagoya for Abusive parent training

We visited Nagoya for their workshop of groups focused on retraining of abusive parents or the preventative training. They were able to obtain over 40,000 signatures to influence the government to make the training policy.

The founder of Youkikai father is in his 90s and one of the first foster care fathers in Nagoya. Over the course of decades, he has housed and raised over 50 children in addition to his own.

Currently in Nagoya, all foster parents have formed a group where they meet once a month as a support group for each other.

YouMeWe has supported some of the family’s with laptops as the youth are in school and flourish with the tools received in coding and their school work. We also have Life Connection Events like when Balloon Circus visited.

In addition to YouMeWe’s support Delinian, the group company of Institutional Investor has donated funds to Youkikai to work towards developing a Social Impact Bond where we can expand the work of Youkikai and reunite more children with their rehabilitated parents.

Over 3,000,000 children live in poverty in Japan as do most of the single parents. As if they are floating down the “river of poverty” from the mountain, we have been able to save 33,000 into orphanages and 14,000 into Foster Care but needless to say there are still 2,953,000 children continuing down the river.

205,029 child abuse cases reported last year up from 1,500 when the law required they be reporting in 1990.

The children protection center was built directly across the street from Youkikai’s headquarters in Nagoya. You can hear the young children sometimes too young to understand screaming “MA! MA! Why?” wondering where she is or why they have been detained here.

YouMeWe’s founder Michael Clemons visited Nagoya in 1989 for the first time when he came to Japan. His roommate in college mother is Japanese and father is American. His grandmother lived in Nagoya so on the first day of OBON, we stayed for several days.

In the morning she would be awake and grilling fat slices of toast on a griddle for the grandchildren when they woke but divided by language, she sat down in front of him and started to say “ka ki ku ke ko; ma mi mu me mo; sa shi su se so; ta chi tsu te to” in exchange once he realized what she was doing,, he would say the alphabet and she would repeat each letter after him.

Years later, back in the US when Apple computers came out with Japanese font, he thought that simply writing in English, it would translate to Japanese so wrote an 8 page letter thanking her for the visit and an update on what he was doing.

The 8 page letter of nonsense was received and taking from home to home trying to decipher the pages. Was it English sounded out in Hiragana? Was it something else?

Years later the American Chamber of Commerce was having their 25th anniversary of the walkathon and planned to raise 25,000,000 JPY that year. The proceeds were to also go to the then NPO Michael was managing. Though in the end the funds were raised the board of the NPO declined to take the funds so this became the seed for the CCF Community Children’s Fund which provides scholarships to orphaned children in the community.

Yearly YouMeWe meets with the scholars and aside from scholarships we are able to provide to some of the students from the Mark Bell scholarship, YouMeWe provides laptops to all of them as they start their careers in junior college or university.

Last year on children’s day, one of the 19 year old foster sons of the Youkikai founder took him to lunch on a Friday. He was now working and had bought his first car. He treated the foster father for the first time and thanked him for all the support he had given him over the years. He admitted that he had been bad but wanted to do good going forward.

The father was very proud of the day and the meal which was probably the only meal they had shared alone over the years as there are usually 25 people to feed at their home daily.

The next day at a symposium, the father received a phone call that the boy had been at a river with his friends for a BBQ and jumped in to swim. This river is notoriously dangerous and the boy’s body washed up downstream. 

Michael was out of the country at the time and received the news from Dan, one of the teachers. Not knowing which of the boys it was until much later.

When Michael returned to Japan, he made the journey after the funeral and after the ceremonies. Met at the station. Bowed to the father and hugged him. He said to a colleague that was the only hug he had received during the entire ordeal.

 Michael recalled how proud the boy was of himself and how after one of the visits when the boy had graduated from high school, the boy checked his phone for the weather forecast for him and as he drove away the boy waved the entire time until the car was blocks away and out of site. 

Today the boys biological mother joins the 25 people for meals as she is alone otherwise.