Local woman helps abandoned animals in quake ravaged Japan
Posted April 14, 2011 3:13 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
WHITE ROCK (NEWS1130) – A White Rock woman has paid her own way to Japan to help abandoned animals. She’s in an area where thousands of farmers left their livestock and pets because of the radiation scare.
Chizue Lister has been working near the Fukushima nuclear plant for a week now with a team of seven other volunteers. She wears a radiation suit for protection because she’s inside the evacuation zone. She says it’s heartbreaking to see the animals that haven’t fed in weeks. “They hear my walking, and then they stop crying, like feed me, feed me.”
Her, and six others are feeding those animals and providing whatever other help they can, but many of the animals have died and others have wasted away to nothing.
Lister is concerned about them, and her husband, back home in White Rock, is concerned about her. “He said, ‘Don’t go, don’t go, don’t do that.’ But I can’t stop it.”
People have been ordered out of the area 20 kilometres around reactor, and Lister admits safety is a concern. “The power plant workers saw us and they said, ‘What are you guys doing?'”
She will be coming home this weekend.
