Cruise Report

Sept.9th

Peace Boat has been working on the UPA International Cooperation Project. UPA stands for “United People Alliance,” stressing the project’s nature of solidarity between the people. It is a system where Peace Boat delivers donations collected from all over Japan directly to local and regional NGOs at the ports of call. Making the most of the peculiarity that we travel around the world in a cruise vessel, we have deliver many types of donations until now: stationery tools, sports goods, music instruments, agricultural tools, bicycles, etc. For the UPA project, the most important thing is the relation with the local people, overcoming the “giving/receiving” or “supporting/supported” tags, and focusing more on the joint efforts to build a cooperation relationship.

As the voyages departure approaches, many donations gather at the Tokyo Peace Boat Center from all over Japan. Then they are inspected and classified per port of call. Today, we started to do the classification and organization of the goods that will be delivered at our first port of call: Hawai’i.