Fresh Faces

After the tumultuous third week and stabilization during the fourth one, everything seemed to fall into place. On paper, the fifth week was the busiest one according to my plan. It hosted many workshops and preparations for the final week and the last workshop which would have students present their work.

The workshops did not go without technical challenges, but this time I was prepared to face them head on: both technically and mentally. When students started to struggle with choosing entirely new topics for their final map projects, I was ready to pivot and make an adjustment to my plans. Now, instead of trying to come up with research ideas strictly related to Iwate prefecture and social issues, I let students choose from a wider array of topics that could focus on any area of the world and be truly interdisciplinary. Aside from this, it seemed that word had spread about my workshops around school. I could not believe my eyes when three more students showed up to participate, and asked if GIS could be used to help with their own project of tracking sea turtle movements around Otsuchi. It seemed like my efforts finally bore fruit, and the series of workshops was at least somewhat attractive to students in the high school to attend. 

Cultural Exchange

A handful of professors and researchers from AORI decided to include me in their biweekly engagement days in a different high school north of Otsuchi - in a small town called Omoe. Just like in Kamaishi, the high school seemed oversized for its needs, apparently the tsunami had gotten to Omoe too, yet students and teachers were very enthusiastic about their daily lives. I delivered a cultural presentation about my home country - Georgia, starting with my usual disclaimer about me being from the country of Georgia, not the state. To my surprise, most students had actually heard about the country, which was still known to many as “Gurujiya,” a Japanese take on the Russian word for Georgia that was in use before some two decades ago. Listening to a student presentation about their own hometown was absolutely mindblowing - an entire speech in English, it was delivered in such detail and zeal by middle schoolers that I felt like travelling through Omoe’s cliffy shores and eating their seaweed ice cream right in the classroom. 

Omoe was not too far from a cape that was the easternmost point of the main Honshu island - and as I was contemplating inside a Jinja at that very place, a refreshing yet hot summer breeze slowly floated a very certain thought in my head - this was my second to last week in Japan. 

A New Kind of Thought...

After a bit more than a month of full immersion in Otsuchi and so many different emotions, I was not ready at all to even think of leaving. My workshops were just starting to flourish. Students were slowly getting better at manipulating the software and my cultural immersion was at its zenith. These thoughts would carry me away into the next week.