When the March 11 earthquake hit Japan, Niigata resident Isabella Gallaon-Aoki "missed it completely." Ironic, in that she would soon find herself in the very bowels of the disaster area, and travel there some 20 times over the next two months.
A resident of Japan for 25 years, Gallaon-Aoki was out walking with her younger daughter when the quake struck. "It was the day her entrance examination results came out for high school," she explains, "and I tried to phone my husband to tell him she'd passed, but couldn't get through." Her first thought was that she hadn't paid her phone bill, "always a possibility with me, I admit."
Soon, however, on a store TV screen, Gallaon-Aoki saw the images of the tsunami. "I thought, my God, this is horrendous." Her next thoughts were that there would be animals involved. "I don't want to be portrayed as an animal freak who doesn't care about human beings. But what I do is rescue animals, and I thought that had to be my role," she says.