Work has been extremely busy for the past couple of months so I haven’t had an opportunity to write up any blog posts lately. Now that things have settled down I can talk about what I’ve been up to.
At the beginning of July, there were two big work events that I have been busy preparing for and one big event at home. Since the start of June, the kindergarten began practicing for the annual Sports Day festivities. Sports Day is a half-day event, usually on a Saturday or Sunday, where family and friends of the kids gather to watch the kids compete in different races and activities. The obstacle course races for the two older classes include an English challenge, so my participation is essential.
The day after the kindergarten sports day was Baby Bear’s birthday! Our little bear is now 8 years old!! Baby Bear wanted a small party at home so we let him invite a few friends. They all came and had a great time playing together. This also included a lot of preparation from Papa Bear and me (cleaning, planning games, party favors, and baking a cake). At the end of the day, Baby Bear said it was the best day ever.
On top of all of this, the geopark has been preparing for our UNESCO revalidation mission that took place during the first week of July. Preparation for this started almost a year ago since we have to submit various reports about the geopark’s activities and management. Of course, everything is conducted in English, and as the geopark’s main English support, I have been very busy translating everything and helping to plan the schedule for the revalidation. Just to give you an idea of how much translation prep went into this, I translated over 300 pages of documents, scripts, presentations, evaluation reports, guidelines, and more. UNESCO assigns two evaluators to visit the geopark for several days so we can prove that we still have the right to use the UNESCO name. It’s a big undertaking and this type of revalidation happens every four years. I won’t go into detail this time around, so for anyone interested, you can see my posts on the previous revalidation in 2019.
This year we were originally assigned one evaluator for Vietnam and one from China, but two weeks before the revalidation was set to begin, the Vietnamese evaluator had to cancel last minute and another Chinese evaluator stepped in to take their place. Due to COVID, there is a huge backlog of geopark revalidations that need to be done so our evaluators were actually assigned to two geoparks here in Japan one after the other. We had to coordinate closely with the other geopark which added some additional complications to creating the schedule. Thankfully, in the end, everything worked out well. The 5-day schedule was very similar to the one from four years ago starting with picking up the evaluators from the airport then having guided tours around the geopark and various meetings, dinners, and going over documentation.
These events are also covered by local media. There have been a couple of articles in the local and prefectural newspapers, and it was even featured on the local TV news.
Since this was my second revalidation, I had a much better idea of what to expect and felt more prepared and comfortable with the material and am more knowledgeable about the geopark in both English and Japanese. I still had pre-prepared guide scenarios that I could just read off during the majority of the time, but there were times when I didn’t have any and had to interpret on the spot. I still struggled at times, especially during long dinner speeches and interpreting into Japanese for the closing meeting and press. Luckily another Japanese coworker who is fluent in English was assisting me at the time.
At the very end, both of the evaluators had great things to say about the geopark so we are hoping for a favorable result. All of the revalidation reports submitted by the evaluators will be reviewed by the Global Geopark Network board in September, then those recommendations will be sent to UNESCO for the final results in February or March of next year.
Since I was in the middle of everything I didn’t have a chance to take many pictures, but here are a few from the geopark revalidation.
Now that the geopark revalidation is over I can focus on preparing for the international geopark conference in early September that’s being held in Marrakesh, Morocco!
Kuma no Kazoku 