JAPANEXILE

Welcome to my Blog!

(Update: I decided today to move my blog over to a dedicated webhost rather than the free service provided by wordpress, which will allow me to upload all my photos directly into my blog, rather than the rather inelegant solution I had before of merely linking to my Flickr account. I’ve just copied over the posts from my old site so the timeline is a little shaken.)

But anyway, as this is the first post on my new site an introduction is needed. My name is Tom, I’m 18 and have recently left School and am spending my Gap Year before University as a representative of the charity group Project Trust. I was placed much to delight in Japan as a volunteer teacher.

Although Japan may at first seem strange place to be sent to do volunteer work, there is a genuine need for young people from Europe to visit there. I have been placed in the small town of Toya, located on the Northern island of Hokkaido. Toya is a small rural village with a population of only 2000 people and is situated right on the shores of a volcanic lake. Agriculture is the main industry and tourism is also very important to the region. The Village is about 2 hours drive from the nearest city and it is blanketed in heavy snow from November to March so the town is very isolated and as such gives the volunteers who go there a great insight into Japan.

I am being hosted by the Toya board of Education. My main role will be to assist with English conversation by giving lessons at the local school as well as running adult evening classes. In addition to my role as a teacher I will also be helping out at the local Kindergarten and spend one day a week doing voluntary work at the local Hospital.

Its hard to describe how excited I am at the prospect of spending a year away. I will be updating this blog whilst I am out there with my thoughts, photos, and whatever else takes my fancy whilst I am out in Japan. Selfish as it may sound I will mainly be keeping this blog as way to remember my year in the future, as well as keep friends and family updated with what I am up to. I hope you enjoy reading, please feel free to make any comments, would be nice to have some feedback on how the blog is going.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 7:16 pm and is filed under First Post, Gap Year, Hokkaido, Japan, Teaching, Toya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.