Harvard Workshop at ASIJ

I was a 2nd grader at a school in Tokyo when the March 11 Earthquake happened. I was walking out of my school with a friend and as we were passing by portable basketball hoops, the ground started to shake. At first, we didn't know what was happening, since we had never experienced an earthquake that big. All of the teachers started to run out to the field, telling all of the students to immediately gather in the middle of the field. Even though we had many evacuation drills at school, we had never prepared for an earthquake afterschool. Some of the students had already left school and were on their ways home and so there was a lot of confusion as to what we had to do. After a while, we went back to our classrooms to wait for our parents to pick us up. I remember being so anxious about my parents picking me up even though the earthquake was not so big where I was, and I can't imagine what it felt like being in the Tohoku area.