Harvard Workshop at ASIJ

I was in my 4th-grade science class when I suddenly felt the desks moving. I looked at my classmate and told him to "stop shaking the desks," when I realized that he wasn't the one who was causing our classroom to shake. Our elementary school principal just so happened to be in our classroom at the time of the earthquake, so she told us immediately to go under our desks until the shaking stopped. We were under our desks for quite a while and I remember feeling worried that my mom wouldn't be at school to pick me up. Earlier that morning, we discussed how my sister and I were supposed to walk to our swimming class straight after school where my mom would pick us up afterward. Thankfully, once we were allowed to leave our classroom, my mom was there to pick my sister and me up. On our way home, we felt multiple aftershocks and I saw a car crash into a building. A few days later, we left for San Diego. My dad stayed in Japan and would text us about how Tokyo was like a "ghost town". There were no people or any electricity and he had trouble finding stores that sold water. In San Diego, people around us treated us as if we were refugees. When we got back to Tokyo, my parents didn't allow me to drink water from the tap. I remember our grade got "split" into a group of those who would drink water from the water fountain and those who wouldn't. Although every TV channel was talking about the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear explosion, I never really understood how it affected those in nearby areas until much later.