Prepare your Dinner.

We´ve all seen what happened in Japan.

This blog´s intention is not to narrate the facts or analyze the phenomenon.

Here we are making an invitation to help… and be helped.

The plan is simple.

1. Imagine that it is an important day: a birthday, an anniversary, etc. Imagine that you are inviting friends and family to dinner at a nice restaurant. Imagine that you´ll eat deliciously and maybe you´ll even have one or two bottles of wine. Can you imagine?

Imagine you spend a nice time talking about many things: work, movies, weather, etc… It's not that hard to imagine, right?

Now I ask you to go ahead and do it, but with some minor adjustments:

2. Invite your friends and family to a "dinner." In this case you won´t go to a restaurant. You´ll meet in a house and the reason of the meeting is Japan.

In this case, you won´t have an exotic dish nor a couple of bottles of good wine. Now, dinner will be simple: perhaps some pieces of sweet bread and some milk. The idea is to spend as little as possible on food, so that the money you would´ve spent at a restaurant, you´ll send to Japan.

3. And now that you´re all together, the idea is that instead of talking about the weather or work, you´ll discuss and share

an emergency plan. It’s always important to have a plan, but honestly we rarely make one and we share it with our closest ones. Here are some things you should ask:


a. What documents and objects would need to be on hand in case of an emergency?


b. In case of communication failure, what could be a good meeting place?


c. In case of an earthquake, what should we do?


d. What other activities can we do to prevent further damage in case of a natural disaster?


e. How can we support eachother in the event of a natural disaster?

(on the right side of the blog, you´ll find some downloadable documents that´ll help you to prepare your event)

The invitation is open for you to make one or ten events, gather all the people that you care about and tell them that there are thousands of people on the other side of the world that you also care about and chances are you will one day need them to care about you.

Designate someone to collect the money and make the deposit to any of the organizations that are supporting the Japanese people (here on the right there are some links to help you).


If you organize a dinner, tell us about your experience here. I’m sure everyone would love to know what you did, what your conclusions were, and if you have any new ideas to help.

Invite others to carry out activities like this!


And in the meantime .... Arigato gozai-mas.