Earthquake 3

The town is still going about things as normally as they can. We are lucky that so much of our food comes from the farmers in the area. There is still plenty of vegetables and some home butchered meat coming in. Today the town ran out of one vital supply toilet paper. There is no more for sale in the town. Since there was only one role at my house I'm taking one home from work. This probably makes me the closest thing to a looter in the whole island. I know that this sound like a really trivial thing this close to a disaster and it is. There is strange feeling being this close to the tsunami zone and this far away. We are far enough away to be safe and to be unable to travel there on our own. Especially with the fuel shortage. However, we are close enough that we are running out of supplies so there is nothing to donate. To be honest I feel useless. There is so much that needs done and we cant do it.  Which makes me feel really guilty. I'm thankful to have come through safely and with only supply problems in my town. I just wish there was something I could really do for people. Because of how isolated my town has become we can't even give blood.

Earthquake 2

The Board of Education had the Internet so we should be in a bit more regular contact. Ichinohe is still doing pretty good in a lot of ways. People are calm and going about normal activities as best they can. My school at Kozuya even had its graduation ceremony today. You could almost forget what had happened. Till there was a small aftershock during the ceremony. After the ceremony it was annocunced that the town was out of gas. Rumor is that most of the prefecture may be out as well. The local trains and shikansen are still closed in the north part of Japan. This is mostly to conserve power. The toll roads and main highways are reserved for emergency vehicles only. They are warning people in Tohoku(the north) and Kanto(central Japan) to conserve power as much as they can. With the disasters at Fukushima Daiich and Daini and troubles at other plants the national power situation is a bit difficult. There are going to be rolling blackouts in Tokyo and most of Kanto. I don't think that this will effect our town though we might lose power completely. I want to encourage everyone to look into how they can donate to the relief effort. Many people in Japan have lost everything and need alot of help.

They Japan Meteorological Association has said that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7 earthquake in the 3 days following March, 13.

One site that has been recommended as a place to donate is http://www.amazon.com/.

Earthquake

We are both safe and ok. When the quake hit we were in Cokai at an after graduation party. It started out very slow with no one even seemin scared after it had gone for maybe 3 or 4 minutes it really picked up. Teachers opened doors to the outside and every one got ready to get under the tables. Half way through the first quake the electrcity wentout. At that point none of us hadany clue how bad it really was. All we knew was that our area seemed fine. The teachers sent all the kids outside and away from the building. People turned on their phones and we got news of the tsunami hitting the coast. All we did that day was go home and try and contact other teachers and friend and family back home. We didnt have any power and it was a cold night. The next day we walked around townand got flashlight candles and some food. Our town is very lucky no damage that we saw and no deaths. We were without power and much news for over 24 hours. Since the quake there have been alot of choppers flying over. Its 830 am on Sunday as I write this and we are still having after shocks. Last we heard about Ffukushima nuclear plants thhe evacuation zone was 20 kilometers. They had an explosion there around I think 3 yesterday. Also one of the reactor building roof had colapsed. Im watching the Japanese news and the pictures from the coast are awfull. It looks like whole towns are gone. The damage is very bad. Last figures I saw were 300 dead in Iwate most of that number seems to be from the town of Rikuzentakata. The news is running lists of dead at the bottom of the screen and one whole channel is just messages to family members. Please pray for everyone on the coast and the millions still without power. We are very fortunate we have food water power and neighbors who have checked on us. The only thing we dont have is internet. This is from our keindle.

JET Training in Tokyo

Well I have completed the first day of JET training and one night out of Japanese style bonding with the other new teachers going to Iwate prefecture. There are only eleven new teachers hired in Iwate this year. Just five of us are at this training season. Its a good group there are 3 of us that speak Japanese the other 2 better than me. Four of us are American guys basically straight out of college 3 with experience living in Japan and one who taught English as a foreign language. The last person is an Australian girl who actually taught high school before. She is by far the oldest at 32. That's the group in a nut shell.

As for the training we had a formal opening ceremony. There were speeches by Japanese government representatives and by former JET program participants. The key note speech was on culture shock and ways of recognizing and dealing with it. It was pretty funny and very true. I remember the culture shock the first time I was in Japan. After that we could go to classes of our choosing. I went to one about teaching at multiple school, another about teaching elementary, and lastly one about JETs with families. They were all great. The elementary season was really good and gave me a lot of ideas for teaching the kids. Especially because in elementary we are not supposed to teach grammar or even give grades we are supposed to give them the desire and motivation to learn English latter in life, i.e. Junior High School. Which when I found out we didn't have to teach grammar my response was done and done. The season for married JETs was a bit less helpful than I had originally hoped. It was like find something for your spouse to do like teach English. Which may be less then helpful advice in a small town where the desired English teaching is covered by me. However, it was nice to see that Samantha and I wont be alone there are plenty of other married JETs. In fact the majority at that class were wives who were on the JET program with husbands coming who weren't.

On a lighter not when people find out I'm married they add about 5 years to what they guess my age is.