From the bus we could see the faces of the residents of Tombo House (House for handicap people) who were already excited to have us there, even when we were still inside the bus.

As soon as we got off the bus, they gave us a very warm welcome, they were ready to start the interaction and so were we.

World Campus – Japan members played a few traditional japanese games, the one on the picture was the most competitive, fun and hard one. Some of us were successful, some other just enjoyed watching others try.

The bottom line was not the actual games, it was about the happiness we were bringing to the Tombo House residents by just spending a good hour playing and interacting with them.

Sometimes we forget how important the little things in life are but in days like this i remind myself to enjoy those little actions because they could lead to amazing results like the one we had that day at Tombo House.

Six Schools and 2200 Kids are being benefited by this eight million dollar facility ran by 22 employees.

I am talking about the school lunch facility of the city of Ueda, where they even have a special room to cook the food of kids with allergies… Pretty well organized I must say, and the best of all, most of the energy they use to cook comes from the solar panels located on top of the building.

In Japanese Schools, the lunch hour is an actual class, it’s called Food Education. The kids learn from early age, how to eat healthy, they also learn about manners and even about portions and how to make sure everyone gets something to eat. Kids are assigned to serve the food and after the meal they check how well their classmates eat as a whole group.

As we all know, every country has their own system an after our tour at the facility we had time to share the different systems.

We thought the United Kingdom system is the most fun, interactive and fare system of all. Totally Harry Potter Style.

The schools are divided into groups or “houses” just like in Harry Potter. Each group competes to get points for eating healthy food, a teacher is assigned to eat with individual students, rotating everyday, that way they can evaluate how the student is eating, what they eat and how healthy the food is, the student’s eating habits basically.

Another very interesting thing about the system in the UK and that it might have nothing to do with Harry Potter is the fact that the school lunch is cooked taking in consideration the religion of the majority of the students there. If the school population is mainly Muslim, they will not cook anything with pork or if the majority of the students are from India you won’t find any beef in the menu at that school.

Interesting eh? the beauty of diversity and accepting differences.