Winter Greetings from the Tatsuki Family for year 2004
The year 2003 went by so fast and was filled with lots of good memories and milestones. The whole family went to the cabin in Nojiri in the summer and the winter this year. This photo shows us in our Lake Nojiri cabin at the end of 2003. The cabin was covered by almost one and a half meter deep snow and we felt even deeper tranquility.
Maika spent a year and a half at Hawaii Preparatory Academy (on the big island) in their intensive English program. Since the end of this summer, she transferred to Canadian Academy, a nearby international high school on Rokko Island. She has made a marvelous adaptation from Hawaii back to Kobe in terms of her social life and has been working very hard academically in order to survive in the mainstream school curriculum.
Satoshi is in his last year at Nishinomiya Kofu high school. He has spent his extra time preparing for college entrance exams and has also been regularly volunteering at the local YMCA day camp programs for children with learning difficulties/differences. He was accepted by the department of psychology, at Koshien University whose president is a renowned social psychologist. He is now wondering whether to major in social or clinical/educational psychology when he starts college in the Spring of 2004. He enjoyed snowboarding this winter and still enjoys being tallest in the family.
Donna is almost finished her second full academic year at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies in the Anglo American Studies Department. She is busy developing curriculum for Gaidai’s new graduate program in TESOL for in-service teachers and has also been teaching two graduate courses for Kwansei Gakuin University. Despite this full schedule, she also is the editor of a refereed academic journal, serves as a board of trustee member for Canadian Academy and Kobe YMCA and is working on corpus based pragmatic research. Donna presented a paper in Toronto in July—her first time back in nine years. She continues to study Japanese language every Tuesday.
Shigeo is enjoying his third year at Doshisha University in Kyoto. He made several trips to Marikina city in metro Manila, Philippines, in order to facilitate disaster prevention workshops. He also visited Maui, the San Francisco Bay area, LA, New York, and the 2002 EU flood hit cities such as Vienna, Salzburg and Passau in order to learn more about US and EU crisis management systems. Shigeo continued to do a lot of consulting work with government organized workshops for community groups and gave numerous public lectures on disasters and civil society. To reduce stress he has opted for going for brisk walks on the greenbelt that surrounds Rokko Island City.
As we enter 2004, our thoughts go out to family, friends and colleagues around the world.
Peace and love to all of you.
Shigeo, Donna, Satoshi and Maika Tatsuki
