Earthquake Day 1:Ignorance is Bliss?

Day 1

Ignorance is Bliss?

***I would like to apologize for any confusion about my earlier post relating to earthquakes. I was referring to earlier in the week and made the post before these major earthquakes happened. ***

Around 2:30 PM Friday, I was busy carrying on with my day. We were sitting in the office discussing the previous night’s birthday celebration (my blog before the quake). I had just finished writing my lesson plan for the day when all of a sudden the table started to shake.  I was thinking oh wow its another earthquake. All of a sudden the building felt like it was lifted and dropped. People started screaming and we all jumped under our desks. A voice in my head kept saying to myself, it will all be ok. Everything will be over soon.  I honestly have a lot of trouble putting into words how scary the actual quake felt to me. However, there was a very calming presence within me that kept me so relaxed in one of the worst natural disasters in the world.

As soon as the first was done, we all ran outside. I could see little cracks in the foundation. Parents and children were crying. Luckily, most students don’t show up to school until 3:30ish on Friday. Most of the kindergarteners were taken home around 2. I hate to say the timing of the earthquake was a blessing but I can’t imagine trying to keep all of our children calm and safe during the whole ordeal.  Luckily, it was only us teachers there, and a few parents and students that were still around. 

From the major quake on, we continued to have a few earthquakes almost hourly. Some were pretty rough but none seemed to last very long.  To be honest, we had so many earthquakes that I became desensitized to anything that didn’t last longer than a minute.  As the quakes lessened in severity, we came back in to check the damage.

Going back in there, I was just shocked at all the stuff that flew on the floor, the plates and dishes and cabinets were tipped over.  There were cracks in the wall, fish tanks were broken with fish dying in them. (Please understand that we had no clue at the time that so many were worse off than we were.) Within minutes of the first quake, all power, water, and cellphone networks went completely out.  One teacher had just enough time to try to post on everyone’s walls that we were ok.  Without power, we decided to all huddle at our campus and stay there that night. Everyone pooled food and decided to stay in the classrooms.  Though people were scared of aftershocks, we had been told that the buildings our classrooms are in are so structurally sound that they would roll down the hill before they crumbled. 

On Friday, all we knew of the damage was that there was an old apartment complex that fell in Sendai. Also, a train was derailed. Clearly, we literally had no good means of communication that night. We even had trouble communicating between the two campuses. I don’t think we even had a clue about the Tsunami until late Friday night. All we could rely on were bilingual staff members that occasionally received updates. Honestly, people reading this blog right now still probably have a better clue of what all happened. I have seen a few photographs but I really don’t want to see it all for a while. All I can say is it is such a different experience when is literally in your own town. My heart always went out to people that had issues but I seemed to live in this untouchable bubble where that stuff didn’t happen to me. However, I was truly blessed to be so safe in this time of tragedy. Honestly, the worst thing that happened to me was that someone’s coffee spilled on my buttcrack during the quake and I had a huge bottle of Lowry’s steak seasoning that broke all over my floor. God has really blessed us through it all.