Yuko Haruna

William: Hello and welcome to People and Places, the programme from BBC Learning
English that searches the world for interesting people and interesting stories.
William: Today we’re going to be hearing from Yuko Haruna from Japan, who I spoke
to on the telephone. I’ll let Yuko introduce herself… see if you can hear what it
is that she does…
Yuko: My name is Yuko Haruna, I’m from Japan. And… I want to work for traffic
education or traffic safety. I… I was a member of traffic safety association, but
I think I need more knowledge… I quit… I quit the job last year and now I’m
studying for an exam. I want to go to university again.
William: Yuko said that she’s studying for an exam because she wants to go to
university again. Yuko was a member of a traffic safety association, or we
might say a road safety association - an organisation that campaigns to reduce
the number of car accidents.
Why did Yuko become involved in road safety?
Yuko: To…to tell the truth, I… I myself was hit by a car when I was eighteen years
old. And when I was twenty years old, one of my friends passed away because
of a car accident. I couldn’t believe… I still can’t believe! He was, he was not twenty, he was nineteen, nineteen years old. It changed my life… and at that
time I decided I want to work for traffic safety…
William: Yuko said that she was hit by a car herself when she was eighteen, and then
when she was twenty, one of her friends ‘passed away’ because of a car
accident. What she means by ‘passed away’ is that her friend died. Death is
very difficult to talk about, so we sometimes use this expression, passed away,
instead of saying that a person has died.
Yuko’s friend was only nineteen years old when he passed away. She said that
she still can’t believe it.
Yuko: It changed my life… and at that time I decided I want to work for traffic
safety…
William: She said her friend’s passing away changed her life… so, it affected the rest of
her life.
This explains how she came to work for a road safety association, trying to
educate people in the importance of road safety. In the five years that she was
working there, Yuko came to believe that there was one aspect of road safety
that was especially important:
Yuko: One the most important things is how to reduce the sadness that lots of people
who lost their loving child or friends and they… they’re still suffering from
sadness. It’s… it’s… it's difficult, even for me to say how I felt or how sad I
was, because… um… I think there was few people who could understand how
I really felt… William: Yuko said that one of the most important things is reducing the sadness of
those people who have ‘lost’ a family member or friend.
If someone close to you dies, we often say that you have ‘lost’ them. And, we
call the sadness that you feel when you lose someone ‘grief’. There’s also a
verb form: ‘to grieve’ which we use with the words ‘for’ and ‘over’. After
someone passes away, friends and family grieve for them, or we can say, they
grieve over their friend’s death.
Now Yuko wants to learn how to help other people. She’s writing a children’s
book about a moon who loses his little sister. And, she’s going back to
university – to study counselling for grieving parents and friends.
Yuko: And I was looking for what… what to study… I mean, what kind of skill I
need… and I began to study kind of counselling, stress management, how to
help people.
William: Yuko’s story shows how it’s possible to turn tragedy and grief into something
positive, that can really help other people.
That’s all for this week, but there’ll be another person, from another place, in
next week’s People and Places. Goodbye!