Activities

Today, the class had the privilege to visit “The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial” as part of the Risk Management II class. The trip supervised by Prof. Nakahara and co-supervised by Ms. Mai deepened my understanding on the importance to prevent and reduce disasters and the relevance to build community resilience to overcome adversities.
Along the field trip, the Memorial videos shows the impact of a 7.3 magnitude earthquake that took place on January 17, 1995, in the northern part of Awaji Island destroying more than 120.000 houses and taking the lives of more than 6.400 people.

However, the videos also shows that the natural disaster developed among the Japanese people the sense of community. For instance, 1.380,000 volunteers from around the country headed to disaster area with supplies, managed shelters, cooked meals, offered medical aid, took care of the elderly people, and built temporary shelters. Along the exhibitions, the first one presents victims′ personal belongings (picture on the left) along with their survival stories. The second exhibit shows different ways to prevent and mitigate disaster, such as changes on the criteria and materials use to build facilities, signs on the street pavement indicating the existence of rescue centers, tools to rescue victims, new career path in the disaster area and educating people to act. This field trip reminded me about Mozambique 2019 Idai cyclone and Haiti 2010 earthquake because on both cases the countries went through social disintegration with an increase of conflict and violence that endures until today.

So, my takeaways from this field trip are: (i) Developing African countries need to invest funds on prevention and mitigation of natural disasters, such as facilities, training staff and educating people; (ii) During natural disasters period, developing African countries need to deepen their sense of community to rebuild faster their countries.