R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

While visiting an elementary school (for my new job! hooray!) I got to hear a presentation  from Mercy Corps which is an organization started after 9/11 to help kids cope with disasters, both natural and other.  Currently they are working in Japan, and the slides showed some of the wreckage there, and the cleared roads between piles of destruction so that emergency vehicles could get through.  What amazed me and gave me goosebumps was that the presenter said she saw workers looking through the wreckage for remains of people, and if they came across something in tact, like a vase, they'd leave by the roadside in front of where that house would have been in case family members or survivors came back to the house.  This absolutely stunned me, though in reflection, I can't say I'm too surprised that it is the Japanese doing this.  Having lived there a year, I can absolutely believe that that was not a fluke incident, but a more common act of respect in that country. 

Take those thoughts in contrast to our own natural disasters going on with the flooding of the Mississippi, and people in Tennessee being reluctant to leave their homes because others are coming in specifically to loot.  Things are very, very wrong there, and I'm not talking about the wet.  What has happened to respect?

Here are some shots of a few of the characters I had the pleasure  of teaching in Japan.