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Looking forward to meeting prospective interns and past interns alike!

By Jasmine Parmley

Photo: Starr Sandoval

During training last week, my fellow interns and I were asked to draft a letter to our future selves. We were told to write about our hopes for the coming weeks, what we were excited about, what we wished to achieve through helping others learn English, and how we felt about meeting our new students. 

A time capsule in letter form. You know the drill.

We were to revisit these letters at the end of the program.

Perhaps we were supposed to write something heartfelt and emotional— something to help us reflect on our summer in Japan. 

Although I did not yet have a clear vision of what I wanted to achieve as an English Camp intern, I was certain that I could at least write a decent letter.

“Dear Jasmine,” I began. After staring blankly at the empty lines on my paper for far too long, I jotted down a quick sentence or two about needing to purchase sweat-proof makeup to survive the Tokyo heat and closed my notebook.

There is a saying that “less is more”, but unfortunately in this case, “less” was simply “less” and nothing more.

In my defense, I had just suffered through a long, humid, jet-lagged Tokyo morning, but this did not change the fact that I was not proud of my letter.

I had not given this incident any more thought until a couple days ago, when my students had the task of writing a letter to an expert about the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. 

During this activity, one of my students experienced a mild case of writer’s block. I advised him to include questions that he had about the United Nations and their goals.

When stuck, asking questions is usually a good place to start.

Remembering my own case of writer’s block that I had the week before, I took my own advice and tried again.

In lieu of my almost-letter that I wrote during training week, I filled the margins of my textbook with questions I had about my impact as an English Camp mentor. My words were addressed again to the same person that I had failed to write to before: myself. 

So far, my small collection of questions covers topics such as discussing gender equality with students, keeping motivation levels high, and being aware of the space I take up as a foreigner. I have yet to figure out how to approach these ideas, but they keep me thinking.

While these new questions to myself take a very different shape from the letter that I originally wrote, they still have the same purpose of helping me figure out how I can best contribute to this program.

I can’t wait to find my answer.

Some quick notes:

• Fruit is expensive

• Microwave popcorn does not exist (in my experience)

• Be very cautious when using Google Translate’s photo translation feature

• Learning katakana, or the alphabet Japanese uses to spell out foreign words, will save you time

“Well... that doesn’t smell right.”

I mumbled this to myself after I poured what I thought was laundry detergent into the washing machine. Unbeknownst to me, it was bleach. You may be wondering how one confuses detergent for beach, the answer comes from the 3rd bullet point above.

I was shopping for laundry detergent at the Seiyu near my share house and there was an aisle with a wall of what looked like cleaning supplies. But I wanted to double check, so I used my Google Translate app to take a picture and translate the characters on the bag. Google came up with “Laundry Soap.” Which sounded a lot like a literal translation of detergent to me.

Yeah… I was super wrong. It was bleach. Let this story serve as a warning not to cheat the translation process. In a much less damaging - but equally confusing - situation, I bought grapefruit juice assuming it was orange juice.

Photo cred link: here

Grocery shopping is a confusing experience in a foreign country, but if you go in with some pre-researched translations of the important items you need (or pictures from Google if all else fails), you can easily avoid the bleach and grapefruit juice.

- Tabitha