Sam, fully capturing the experience is impossible

It’s our last day in Japan and of course there’s mixed feelings. I don’t want to leave but I do miss home. There’s too many things that happened these past two weeks to try and write in a blog post. In fact I’m not sure it would be possible to write everything down at all. But even if I could, I wouldn’t. It’s impossible to capture what we saw in words. The disaster area, our homestay, all the temples (too many to count), all the different shopping areas. We took pictures and videos of the things we saw, but there’s no way to contain Japan in a 2.5in screen.

I’m writing this after our final debriefing session and there were things people said that I will definitely bring back with me. It also brought up memories from earlier in the trip, what our guide Konno said, the videos we saw of the rolling tsunami, what we did with our host families. I really do wish there was some way to tell these stories, but to write it out would be to simplify it to only the things I can remember.

There’s also no real way to thank all the people who brought us here and made this trip what it was. They paid for everything and brought us all over Japan and showed me things I would never have seen on my own.

These are memories that I will never forget. And bonds that will never be broken. And I will find some way to pass on these lessons and stories to our children so that no one will forget this.