Michael Tierney departed for Japan in November 2011 hoping to make a difference in the regions devastated by the earthquake and tsunami back in March 2011. Here's his personal account of his experience.

"Since the March earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I wanted to find a way to find a way to personally help in the affected Tohoku region. The Salesforce Foundation is a wonderful resource for directing the contribution of efforts to causes worldwide,

I started at Salesforce.com as a contractor in January 2011, and immediately became aware of something going on there which I had not seen before, but which makes so much sense that the biggest surprise is that all companies do not do it: since the goal of any business is to maximize what it takes from the community, shouldn’t it also be a part of every company to give back? This is the Salesforce.com 1% model – to give 1% of the company’s resources, including employee time, to helping the communities they serve – and in the case of a global company, this includes the entire world.

In March 2011, from afar, I saw something terrible happen to my wife’s home country of Japan. I consider Japan in many ways to be my country as well, and have always identified with the pragmatism, and the drive to improve found in the Japanese people. After the earthquake and tsunami there, I resolved that if I were to join Salesforce.com, I would use some of my time volunteering to help Japan. After I started as a full-time employee in June, I began to plan for volunteering there.

How to help Japan was the question. At first glance, it seems like helping to clean out and/or rebuild buildings would be the most direct way to help. But, the reality is that what happened in March will change the history of Japan forever. Even if somehow every building was rebuilt overnight, just as it was before, it would still not be the same. Lives and livelihoods have been affected forever. And so, the future of the affected regions of Japan lies solely with the Japanese people there, who will create that future.

When the Salesforce Foundation offered me a teaching position at Katariba’s Onagawa Kougakukan night school, I initially thought about whether this would help, and that was when I realized that the people I would be helping to teach there were in fact the future of Japan – it will be their decisions that guide what becomes of the affected regions. In that sense, helping children to learn, and to help build their minds and perspectives may well be the best possible way I could help.

And more than anything, I wanted to let them know that each of us in the world is here for each other, and when a tragedy befalls any of us, which at another time could happen to any of the rest of us, we should all do our best to help. Living a mile from California’s Hayward Fault, now considered the most dangerous in California, I am keenly aware of this. So, I accepted my assignment at Kougakukan for a week of volunteering, and made plans to head over to Japan. Since my Japanese level is still very basic, I would teach English in Onagawa, Japan.

However, I am a software engineer, and have spent the last 17 years of my life speaking the language of computers. I hadn’t studied my own language in an academic way in over 25 years, and never in the context of English as a second language. So, it was difficult to come up with a curriculum for the week that would be at the appropriate level for the students. I decided that I would bring some reading material that we could go over together in class, and settled on Peanuts cartoons as some fun material –specifically, A Charlie Brown Christmas has an excellent message about how the condition of the things around you doesn’t matter so much – it is people coming together that makes anything blossom and shine.

I feel strongly that the study of different languages builds the mind. From my study of Japanese and some of the Kanji characters used, I can feel my brain doing different things when reading, and ultimately, speaking, in Japanese, than I ever did using English. But it is also extremely difficult – despite quite a bit of Japanese study, and the ability to read and write over 400 Kanji characters, I still struggle with first-grade-level Japanese. And, as it turns out, it is much the same coming from Japanese to English.

The students at Kougakukan do reading-style study all day at their usual school, and then students who need more help, or who are more motivated to study, come there at night to further their abilities. The class I led for the week was for more advanced students, but just as with my Japanese study, it is very easy to underestimate the difficulty of even basic-level English as a second language. After struggling through an initial Peanuts reading session, it became apparent that adapting, and taking a different approach would be necessary. So, we focused on more interactive activities that would let the kids communicate with each other in English. One exercise I called “Guess Who” – each of us would write several things about ourselves in English based on a topic, such as what you did in the last day, and then we would exchange the papers, each student and teacher would read them, and try to guess who wrote it. We also did some more traditional language-based games, such as Hangman, and 20 Questions, and some adapted Japanese word games, such as Shiritori.

I also assisted in some of the other classes, writing some dialogues in English to go over in class, and helped with readings and some conversations. I certainly developed an entirely new and deeper appreciation for teachers, and the difficulty of what they do every day.

In the end, while I may be a better software engineer than an English teacher, what I remember most from every single class were the big smiles and laughs from these children who have been through so much. I think I was able to teach them a bit. And, beyond English as the subject of study, we all certainly learned a lot more about each other, and that despite our varied backgrounds and experiences, we’re not all that much different, which really is the best lesson of all. I hope to go back again one day and see a fully-recovered Onagawa, perhaps led by some of the very students I met there."