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Tiffany
May 26, 2007

Today we experienced something that was more powerful than probably anything else most of us will ever experience.  Today we visited Hiroshima and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.  It was a very emotional and moving experience. 

Walking through the memorial  and seeing the complete and utter devastation that the atomic bomb caused to the city was both fascinating and terrifying.  We saw pictures and models of the buildings and the city before and after the bomb, and it went from looking like a normal little city to a complete desert wasteland. 

The part that really started to get most of us was when it got to the people.  This section started out with wax figures of a woman and two children standing among burning ruins, bleeding, with their flesh melting and falling off.  From here on it was room after room of tattered clothes and other small things that were all that remained of the people who were killed, and they were mostly belongings of children.  It was heartbreaking because plaque after plaque was the same.  People survived the initial blast only to die agonizing deaths hours or even days later.  The children were out on demolition crews breaking down buildings because of the war, so they were the ones who were mostly injured in the bomb blast; most of the children in Hiroshima died, acquired lifelong pathologies or lost all their families because of the bomb.

This was a very moving experience for everyone, but we all took away something different.  It affected us all in a different way.  Once we got outside we were mugged by groups of little Japanese children who wanted to talk to us and interview us.  Every time they came up to me all I could think of was all those tattered little clothes and all those poor children who had done nothing wrong but who suffered and died because of the choices of their government.   This is definitely an experience that none of us will ever forget. I’m not sure what everyone else took away, but the whole time all I could think of was this: We are supposedly such an advanced civilization, and we’ve made so many technological advances, yet we still solve our problems with war.  With everything we have, when it comes down to it we solve our problems by killing each other. There has to be a better way.