SICE Opening Ceremony

Today we attended the SICE Opening Ceremony. There were 80 or so people in a large auditorium in our local community center. Each table was for a specific junior high where the SICE students teach. Each student, their host family, and representatives from the host school sat in a group. And there were speeches. Oh, soooo, so many speeches. Speeches by the Morioka Board of Education, Iwate University professors, Morioka ALTs, all the SICE students, all the students’ families, all the students’ host schools, and then us. Poor Andy was effectively the keynote speaker and had to deliver a 5 minute long speech in Japanese! It was brutal, but he did a really good job. I thought that since Yuki had put Catie & I at our own table in the “kids section” in back near the door, I was safe from having to speak. Um, NO. I was completely unprepared and the only person in the entire room who didn’t speak in Japanese. I felt pretty silly, but luckily as the faculty spouse all I really needed to say was thank you for welcoming us to Morioka. This is the 4^th time I’ve had to give a little welcome speech since we got here. You would think I’d expect it by now, but they keep surprising me!

the SICE students on stage for their welcome speeches

Catie was really good for most of the ceremony. She burned through all the activities I’d brought about 2/3rds of the way through, but she was the only kid under 5 who wasn’t running around like crazy by then. Of course after the ceremony she ate 2.5 chocolate donuts and then was positively bouncing off the walls- sprinting all over the community center, spinning circles, and jumping on the couches. Lucky for us, that was not considered bad behavior, especially not after sitting (relatively) quietly for the whole ceremony. Instead everyone commented on how genki she was.

Catie's Thomas cards turned out to be a big hit for a lot of the children present

All in all, the ceremony went well. I think the students enjoyed having their team (family & school reps) surrounding them and it was important to see just how many people are involved with SICE. I knew that this was SICE’s 41^st year in Morioka, but it’s a little overwhelming to realize how big this program actually is here given how small it seems at Earlham. The Morioka public schools really rely on Earlham to provide their native English speaking teachers through SICE and ALT. As a result, it was an impressive gathering.