There’s No Place Like Home Quake Brings Spokane Teachers Home Early

Two Spokane teachers who didn’t want to live in fear after surviving Japan’s deadly earthquake came home to safety Friday evening.

Marilyn Brennan and Marilyn Reiman found themselves in their husbands’ arms at Spokane International Airport.

“I’m just happy to be here,” said Marilyn Reiman. “It’s amazing to think that we’re out of there.”

The English teachers had been living in Spokane’s sister city of Nishinomiya since July through an exchange program with Washington State University.

Right after the earthquake, they began the process of reassembling their possessions and creating a survival plan for the aftershocks.

But by Thursday, Brennan said they began questioning why they were staying there.

“We started putting the evidence together,” Brennan said. And then the apartment they were staying in was evacuated.

That ended the discussion.

“Once we made the decision to leave,” Brennan said, “there was no stopping us.”

The first thing they saw after landing in America were San Francisco newspaper headlines announcing that Japan’s quake survivors now faced the threat of disease.

It just reinforced their conviction that leaving was the best thing to do.

“We could have written those headlines,” Reiman said.

What will they do now that they’re home?

“Bath,” was Reiman’s immediate response. “And maybe some sleep, and then a reassessment of what to do next, if we need to help the other teachers still there realize that they can come home if they want to.”

Christine Sodorff, who organizes the recruitment of the exchange-program teachers, said that the program will not be canceled, although no one knows yet when school will resume. Each year, WSU sends three teachers and Spokane District 81 sends three.

The other teacher there through the WSU program, Deborah Strode, is remaining in Japan. Strode, who went to stay with a Japanese family after the quake, is spending her second year in Nishinomiya.

Reiman said that she heard that the other Spokane teachers are also remaining in Japan. Officials with District 81 were not available to provide additional information after Reiman and Brennan returned.

Sodorff said that although the college chose the teachers that were hired, it has no authority to request that they stay.

“They are invited to return when school resumes if they would like to,” Sodorff said.

Barring another major disaster, Sodorff said, new teachers will be sought for next year’s program.

Reiman said that officials of another foreign English teacher program based in Kobe not only encouraged their teachers to go home, but paid their salary through July.

She agreed with that decision, considering the unimaginable change in circumstances they experienced this week.

Learning a new culture was one of the lures of going to Japan, but an earthquake-ravaged atmosphere turned that challenge into a near impossibility.

The Spokane teachers said they were a little disappointed that only one of their Japanese co-workers came to see if they were all right. Right after the earthquake sub sided, all of the foreign teachers living in the apartment complex began calling out to each other to make sure they were OK. But their group had to look out for itself with no help from Japanese residents.

The foreign teachers also made an effort to find out if their supervisor had survived. They later discovered that she had.

But none of their Japanese friends asked whether they had enough food or water, Reiman said.

Even though they were foreigners, she said, they were expected to be as self-sufficient as the Japanese families who were taking care of themselves.

Brennan said she expected a quicker relief effort from the Japanese government. Even the Japanese have complained that the government’s slow reaction cost lives.

“This is their world,” Brennan said of Japan, “not ours.”

And now the teachers are relieved to be back in theirs.

“Once I heard that she was coming home,” said husband Hank Reiman, “I was on cloud eight.”

Now that he’s actually seen her, he says he’s hit cloud nine.