Jishin! (Earthquake!)

I am so thankful to have been physically uninjured and minimally disturbed by last Friday's major earthquake. And I am keenly aware that millions of people just north of me are unable to say the same thing. Thus, I am conflicted to share the struggles I've encountered as a result of the earthquake's much more minimal effects in my city. They seem so small in comparison. However, they are the struggles I experienced.

Last week there were several small earthquakes that occurred before Friday's quake. A couple woke me in the middle of the night. And some occurred mid-day. But the biggest one occurred just before lunchtime on Wednesday while I was at my one-day-a-week kindergarten, lasting approximately one minute and feeling much more real than any of the other joltings I'd experienced in the 10 previous months. In fact, on Thursday when I went to my main school, I mentioned to my school nurse and my jimuin (teachers' room manager) that I'd had enough earthquakes for the week. And after Friday's quake occurred, I remembered having thought that the week's mini-quakes seemed like precursors to something big yet to come.

I'd finished cleaning up my classroom after having taught my last English class of the day and was walking through the hallways when the quake hit. As I was walking, I didn't initially notice that the vertigo I was experiencing was due to the quake. But the quake quickly became stronger and the school's emergency notification system set in, with the automated warning message sounding and the fire doors closing. Thank goodness that the fire doors have smaller doors built into them, as by the time I got to the bottom of the stairs where I could exit the building, the fire doors had all completely closed.

I looked at one of the other staff members of my school to find out what I should do/where I should go because I'd missed the earthquake drill earlier in the year. He was not helpful in letting me know what I should do. (In his defense, his English is limited.) So when another shock occurred, I went outside where the first and second graders had gathered to leave school at their regularly-scheduled time. I could feel and see the ground rolling like ocean waves and then circling like water going down a drain. And the sixth graders who were setting up the hall for a teacher-appreciation party that was to occur in 15 minutes, came running outside to join us in the courtyard. The rolling and circling of the quake lasted anywhere from three to five minutes; and when the initial quake had stopped, attendance was taken before the students and teachers all went out to the playground, which is a big open dirt field so that we could be away from any debris that might fall. After the rest of the school joined us outside (the other grades endured the quake under the safety of their desks, I assume), we waited for perhaps an hour or 90 minutes for aftershocks to die down before walking the students to their homes, some with their parents who'd come for them, some without.

Skip forward a couple of hours... Around 6pm, the principals dismissed us to go home if we wanted. Upon hearing that there were no traffic signals and that it could take two to three hours to make the trip home by car, I'd hoped that the teachers would want to stay at the school for the evening. (Most schools are designated safety evacuation areas.) But most wanted to go home. So I followed a teacher who lives near me to make the long journey home. It did, indeed, take almost two hours to make the usual 25-minute drive. Traffic was snarled; cement walls around homes had toppled into the streets; roads and bridges had buckled; pedestrians jaywalked to stand in lines at kombini (convenience stores) lit up by car headlights. Upon arriving home, I found some of my neighbors preparing to spend the night in their cars. After climbing the stairs to my fourth floor apartment, I opened my door to find my apartment in shambles. Almost everything in the front half of my apartment had been jostled off the shelves. I had to climb over my shoes, microwave, rice cooker, dish drainer, cooking supplies... to get to the back of my apartment, which I found had fared much better. My furniture had moved six to eight inches away from their original positions; and some things were on the floor. But my TV, computer, and photos survived unscathed. And I had no utilities. I cleaned up some of the broken glass, cleared a couple pathways, and got in bed at 8:30pm.

At 11:30pm, one of my neighbors, C.G., knocked on my door. She'd just accompanied one of her teachers on a six-mile hike home, as the teacher had insisted on going home but was too afraid to drive her car. After finding her apartment in worse shape than mine, she came down to spend the night with me. We both spent the night terrified by the hundred or so aftershocks that continued throughout the night. Every time a strong shock came, we bolted upright, prepared to run out of the apartment. We got absolutely no sleep; and in the morning we felt like we'd been in a war zone due to the rumbling aftershocks that sounded like mortar explosions, emergency sirens that blared all night long, and helicopters droning overhead to survey the damage.

To spare you an even longer post that is already long, I'll share the post-quake stories in a later blog(s).

Until next time...