I have had the pleasure of coming to know a volunteer who is Japanese. She was raised just outside of Tokyo, and family still resides there, although she has been in the United States now for several years.
Her beautiful face and quick smile came to us because her husband is working for a Japanese car manufacturer and has been assigned to California for three years. She is raising their four year old son and with him in preschool she wanted something productive to do.
She is eminently patient when she meets someone new and is asked over and over about the earthquake and Tsunami and how her family fared. She is hard working, respectful to the task and thorough. There is a quiet gratefulness to sitting down to a meal together or approaching a task that is hard to define.
On this day, I learned about her Nuclear family, what the economy is like for young people there, (same as here, no work) and what it is like to be a mother of a completely bilingual son. I shared news of our family, and the enormous bounty of that. She immediately asked if we were Catholic ~ !! Some of us are, but mostly I would categorize us as abundant.
I also learned of her degree in Pharmacology and attending a school in Portland, OR, for several years. She liked the weather there until moving to Davis where there is more sun. At lunch yesterday, my niece was volunteering and very interested in her schooling, being in school herself in the same field. You should have seen the volunteer's face when Sara started asking the questions in fluent Japanese.
It was incredibly fun watching the two of them talk and tell jokes half in English and half in Japanese. It super-charged the day, made the tasks fly by, and we parted in smiles. I think my favorite part of daily life is the potential for every moment to have surprises tucked inside.
No comments:
Post a Comment