Hello everyone! How is it going recently? I think most of you are already on summer vacation, so I hope all of you are enjoying your summer life. As I mentioned in my last report, I was volunteering at Japanese Garden, preschool, and central library. I had worked there for almost 2 months, and I learned many things there. So, in this report, I want to talk about my final thought about service learning and my precious experience with my host family.

Before talking about my final thought, I want to talk about the reason why I took service learning. Service learning is a volunteering experience in US, but it is not just volunteering. We learned about US working culture, and also we learned about each working places. Therefore, service learning is similar to internship in Japan, I think. Actually, I learned how to communicate with guest, how to organize many items, and how to be nice teacher for children. These are just one part of my experience, I cannot tell you all of them because that’s really huge amount. I think learning about US or working custom is really important, this experience is useful for our future, so these are why I took this program. However, the most important things for me is learning about myself. What I want to do and what I can do, they are not always same thing. If I want to do big project there, maybe I do not have enough power to do that. How to know what we can do or what we want to do really is jumping into the new experiences. I learned about myself at every my work places. For example, I did not know I liked making displays. Mostly, people who come here from CJ have to do job hunting after doing back home, so learning myself is helpful to think about their job. Why I can say that is I also got big help to think about my future plan from this service learning program.

As you know, this report is for August, and most people finish their report in August because of visa. However, this is not my final report, and my final report will be in September.
So, from now, I want to tell you the reason why I will stay until September. From July 19th to July 23th, I went to Seattle and Canada with my host family for their family wedding. My host dad is a Chinese American, so their wedding has Chinese traditional ceremony and American style ceremony. I’d never seen Chinese wedding tea ceremony, so that was really interesting for me. Also, after wedding I and my host family went to Canada. We stay in Harrison Hot Springs in British Columbia. That was my first experience of hot springs in outside of Japan. Hot springs and Onsen in Japan is really different. Hot springs looked like a swimming pool. Every body wear swimming suits and swimming in the water. I also enjoyed swimming there. In Japan, we never swim in Onsen, so that experience is really funny for Japanese. I think I’m so lucky because I could go there with my host family. When I came back to Portland, my visa was already expired because I already finished my class, so I came back here with ESTA, a visa for visitor. ESTA is useable for 3 months. That is why I will stay here one more month. I learn many things everyday, so I try to learn as much as I can in one month, and I hope I can write the best report ever.

Thank you for reading my report, and see you on my final report!
Have a good vacation!!

First photo is in Canada.
Second photo is some black berry, but they are wild!!