Team Leader?!

So last night was orientation for Youth For 3.11 x Tokyo Disaster Relief Network. We met up for our 3 hour session to prepare for our departure this Saturday. I'm so stoked to be able to hang out with people my age since all my other friends are much older than me. The group is made up of 10 uni students mostly from Japan. There was one Japanese girl who's doing an exchange program in Orange County which was pretty sweet. I was surprised to see the amount of girls who were there!! I think there were only 3 guys vs 7 girls in our team. Basically we did introductions, a name game, what we want to accomplish and some general rules about volunteering as a student, and the outline of our week. It was super useful to go since we even got to do a Q & A with previous groups who went. The group who talked to us seemed like they bonded a lot during their week.. I'm hoping that my group will bond like that too! From what I got yesterday, everyone seems really nice and I'm really excited to work with them ... oh and by the way, guess who's the team leader? ... ME!! I have no idea why they chose me but they asked me to be the leader which was pretty sweet. I'm kind of nervous but I think it will be a really amazing experience. As a team leader I was asked to come up with a team slogan and rules about our team.... I'm still thinking about the slogan but I did come up with a rule that might be really fun.


Rule #1: Everyone MUST be called by a nickname instead of their real name during the trip.
- in general, most Japanese have a hard time opening up to new people so I thought that this would be a fun way for eveyone to get to know eachother

Rule #2: No "Kei-go"
 - Kei-go is a way of speaking extremely politely to people you don't know or people who are older than you. Most use kei-go when talking to people other than your friends or parents. I personally hate this because I'm not used to using it. So as a team leader I'm going to get rid of it all together. I think that people will really start opening up once they stop caring about who's older or how polite they should be around someone. No stepping around egg shells! Just step on the egg shells!


Anyways, that is it for now. I'm pretty stoked about the whole thing, I think it will truly be life changing.
Sorry I didn't get any pictures or videos. It wasn't really a picture/video taking atmosphere so I couldn't this time around but be sure to check back for daily videos while I'm volunteering!!!!