皆さん、こんにちは！グループ７のフランチェスカです！

I want to write this last personal post in English so that everyone will be able to understand it more easily. Now that the Virtual Exchange Project has ended, I feel like I should express all of my personal thoughts, opinions and feelings that I’ve experienced during this time.

I was one of the two 責任者 or in english “responsibles” of group number 7, 「飢餓対策」, which can be translated to “Zero Hunger” or “Measures against Hunger”.

Let’s start by stating the main reasons why I decided to join this project in the first place.
The first and main reason was to continue practicing my Japanese skills that I have been acquiring in almost 5 years of studying the language (I am at the second and last year of the master’s course), and especially due to the current world’s situation, the chances of being able to actively speaking Japanese are very little.
As for the second reason, I did it because I wanted to test myself. You see, I am the kind of person who tends to really look down on herself, diminish her accomplishments, and consequently easily feels down and demotivated. But, being between the oldest in this group of participants, I was almost certain I would have obtained the position of a “responsible” inside a group; I hoped that, by doing this, I would have improved this side of me, that it would keep me motivated and it would push me to continue doing my best. Which is exactly what happened in the end.

At first, when I saw the topic I would have had to stick with for 7+ weeks I felt a bit disheartened. My first thoughts were: “This is such a difficult topic, even in Italian! How am I supposed to make conversations in Japanese about this be engaging and fun?”. I was also a bit afraid before the first group meeting on Zoom, afraid that the other students from Ca’ Foscari would think of me as a bit “intimidating” because I was in the last year of the master’s course while they still had to obtain the bachelor’s degree. But as soon as I met all of the group members in that call, I felt extremely relieved: despite the differences in years of studying the language, everyone was doing their best, to express their opinions, to show the materials they have found, to show to us all the fruits of their research. It was as if there were really no boundaries to how we could express ourselves, no matter if someone was studying the language longer than another person. The girls I worked with were all extremely talented and were trying their best, even despite the difficult topic. So, I felt more motivated than ever to do everything I could to ensure that their experience in this project would have been the best I could offer them, as their leader and responsible.
Though, I would have most likely never managed to keep it up if it wasn’t for the second 責任者 Letizia, who was extremely sweet and helpful to me during the entirety of the project.

I am more than happy with how everyone worked during this Virtual Exchange: every single week everyone would find a lot of interesting articles, videos, materials about the topic we chose to focus onto, and discuss it with everyone else. And you see, I really started to enjoy talking more and more about world hunger, a subject that I first thought hard and a bit boring. We saw each week a different aspect that was related to the problem, and I learned so many things that I would have never learned otherwise. Like for example, the amount of damage that food loss does. Or the way that we are sacrificing our most precious resources and our planet in general for the massive production of meat to satisfy the demands of the developed countries. Every week we would be shocked by our findings, and we would get motivated to improve our daily lives routines. Which is another reason why I’m very grateful for participating in this project.

There are also many other things that I’ve personally learned thanks to this opportunity, which include but are not limited to: becoming more and more skilled to find materials online (which is very important, I feel like it will help me a lot as soon as I will start working on my thesis), becoming more organized and responsible (I took some time to write all the work we did in a lot of documents, as it was one of my duties as leader of the group), and becoming more confident in speaking Japanese (my shyness and fear of being wrong really held me down during all these years of studying the language). So, in the end, thanks to this experience I learned a lot more than I could have imagined in the first place.

One pretty sad downside was that, despite my group’s combined efforts to make conversations engaging, simple to understand, and with a lot of interesting materials to share and show, at the 自由会話 lessons, we barely ever had anyone wanting to join the talk. I get it, it is a very unpopular topic after all, and I feel like everyone has some misunderstanding about it or a wrong idea of its gravity. However, I want to send everyone this message: I most definitely get the feeling that you would feel more confident to speak about an “easier” or “more familiar” topic, but sometimes it is best to try new things, even if they may not look too appealing at first. I will tell you all this little anecdote: the very first week of the 自由会話 lessons a second year (bachelor’s degree) girl was forcefully sent into my group, and you could clearly see it in her that she was not very happy of being there. However, after speaking with me for the 3 “obligatory” weeks, she came back to me in the 4th one. When I told her that she could have chosen a different group, she answered: “Your topic is actually very interesting, and you’re great at explaining in easy Japanese, you help me understand everything and learn new things!”. You cannot imagine how much those words made me feel relieved and overjoyed. I am so glad that I helped her learn something new and made her feel comfortable enough to speak about my group’s topic.

I feel like there were also a few other downsides to this project, mostly related to the organization behind it, but considering that it was brought up and created from scratch very suddenly, it is understandable. I really hope (but I am kind of sure of it) that if they would repeat this experience, things will definitely be more organized and easier to handle, both for the main coordinators and both for the 責任者 of each and every group. And of course, if people will be curious about participating, and asked me my opinion on it, I would most definitely recommend them to do so.

I wanted to dedicate a part of my report to personally thank the two students from Japan who entered in my group, Yukino and Hiromi, who have been so nice and even way too diligent, because despite the huge time difference between our countries, and the fact that they both were very busy with part-time jobs or other duties, they did all they could to participate: sometimes they even attended the group zoom calls on the train or while walking home! Hiromi also insisted on wanting to write an article for the blog, and she did an amazing job. Their participation was truly precious, both because we made friends, and both because I feel like they helped us Ca’ Foscari students so much in our learning experience. I really hope that this project was a positive occasion for them as well, and that they learned something new about this topic, us Italians and our culture.

Overall this Virtual Exchange, or バーチャル留学, even despite being so short, helped me build up precious self-confidence, made me meet a lot of amazing people (who I really hope to meet in Venice someday), and made me learn way more things than I could have imagined.
Finally, I wanted to thank the teachers and the coordinators for all their hard work, and also everyone who took part in this project.

皆さん、今まで読んでくれて本当にありがとうございました！また会いましょうよ！