Jamie El-Banna, 27, is a self-professed "cynical Londoner" who says he's "not a nice guy" and admits he is known to many as something of a party animal interested mostly in getting drunk. But a look at his recent track record reveals he's now spent over nine months volunteering in tsunami-ravaged Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture (quite a distance from his Osaka apartment), that three of those months were spent living in a tent, that he's the founder of an accredited NPO and, along with being a respected figure in Ishinomaki, is known to thousands of others in and outside Japan.
Not nice? "It's not like I'm a criminal or anything," El-Banna explains. "It's just I'm not out to save the world. I'm not a hippie. I'm not a bleeding heart. I'm just doing this because I think it's the right thing to do. If everyone else disagreed, I'd still be doing it. It just happens that everyone agrees it's a nice thing."
His group, with the rather odd name It's Not Just Mud, grew "organically," its name taken from one of the blogs El-Banna kept in the early days of volunteering in Miyagi. The name was in part in reference to what most volunteers were doing immediately after the quake, digging through not only mud but a whole lot more. It was also a reference to just how much such work meant to many.