Day One

Today is an action packed day where I couldn't get anything done at all, including feeding the cats. By the grace of God I miraculously woke up at 6:30am, took a shower, made my lunch & dinner, ate my breakfast, read my bible and headed to school all before 8am.

As soon as I came I started cleaning the surrounding of my desk. At 10am I headed to the joint Zemi. Much to my delight there was two English presenations, Yamazaki-ken's Kim-san and our own Kim-san. I was able to follow the content and asked a few questions. It's been so long since I've had a meaningful academic discussion with another peer without the language barrier. However, this was more than I could say for the 3rd presentation where the student got grilled by the professor from beginning to the end. Looking back at myself, my presentation is in 3 weeks and I have no data to show, short lab hours and we are all banned from using the analysis equipments. On top of that I have this Japanese proficiency test at the same time in 3 weeks. I am laughing now because it seems just impossible to pull so much out of my behind when pulling one is hard enough.

Aside from that, Matsubara came to the joint seminar but he slept 2/3 of the way through and woke up to listen to Kim-san's presentation, which he had been keen on since the start. When we returned to the G3 building, we were suposed to have an emergency evacuation drill, but he refused to take part. Afterwards, Ohgai-san, Waki-sensei and me went up to room 413 to talk to him, but as soon as they started talking they started fighting. So we did all we could to usher Waki-sensei outside of the room and stop the conversation.

Aside from that, I have been running back and forth between class, taking care of the chores inside the experiment room. Right now only the 3 of us have the keys to 413 and the rest of the students have the keys to 504. We have no access to each other rooms. I was a bit distraught when he asked that Waki-sensei takes away the keys of 413 from the students residing in 504. This means that they will be discouraged to visit us and the thought of isolation scared me a little bit. On the other hand, I am free to visit them anytime, besides I still have tons of things to fix in 504. The funny thing is, they have an old-school rotary phone! Dialing a cellphone number takes about a minute. They have no clean running water, so I traffic a bottle or two upstairs whenever I go up.

His attitude became very soft when talking to me, because he probably understood by now that it's impossible to use Japanese to me because I don't try at all. I kept speaking English to him and he had this bewildered look on his face when I do that. I wonder when I will become magical and would have to endure his bad attitude. He still does not trust any of us, afraid that we might take his data.

So this is day one, not doing so bad, but I am getting so little done and I feel guilty. I received replies from the psychiatrist and the pretty Foreign student center professor. They are both very encouraging. They really don't need to do anything other than encouraging. This, along with God's grace will be enough fuel for me to keep going.