Report for Kumamoto Earthquake Experience Project (KEEP)

The project is aimed to record the experiences of international students from Kumamoto University in order to share the experience to the new generation and let the world know what happened in Kumamoto in April 2016. The other reason is to know the most difficulty of international student faced during the earthquake and to find the solutions for those problems.

The project is composed of four parts; Essays, Interview, Questionnaires and Workshop. First, we collected some essay from the international student for their experiences. And we survey some questionnaires at the workshop and the workshop held in 21^st July.  The name of the workshop is grand challenge workshop. In this workshop, the international students, foreign residents of Kumamoto and Japanese shared their experience of earthquake.  The language of workshop was English.

The workshop has four parts. Part one is the welcome and introduction.  Second part started by sharing story in one group table. Third part and fourth part moved to other different tables for sharing and listening different stories. In the last part, the participants moved back to the first table and make reflection of the last parts. Finally the participants collected what they studied and listened during the workshop. In this workshop, the total participants were 35 people and 9 students from HIGO joined the workshop.

	Figure 1: The pictures of Workshop

 

The workshop was done successfully with the co-operation of students from HIGO and all participants. After the workshop, we discussed what we will do the future for the project. The current process is we are still analyzing the data of Essays and questionnaires. And we are still discussing the future process of project. Currently, we are making some pamphlets and information in English and some languages on natural disasters for the international residents such as do and don’t during the earthquake, providing some important Japanese words and information of how to prepare emergency bag.

		Figure 2: The Pamphlets  of Information for Earthquake

 

What we want to do next is we would like to discuss about the awareness of our findings to University and City Government to provide the better aid for international students.  Bringing up the aims of KEEP, we are trying to show the voices of the earthquake experiences and provide the aid to the person who may be at risk in the future. We would like to thank to HIGO program and Kumamoto University for giving a lot of support to this project.