the scenes in Rastam's office...
good to see you smile, Rastam...
Rastam's office colleagues after the evacuation...
Pakdokter received an SMS from Rastam, pakdokter's son who is working in Tokyo, at 215pm on Friday afternoon saying that there was a 'huge earthquake and office evacuated...' A similar SMS was sent by him to pakdokter's partner who then kept updating pakdokter from home on the unfolding events via reports from the BBC, CNN and Al-Jazeera. Somehow pakdokter was able to remain calm and was able to continue working and paying attention to the few clients pakdokter had to see that afternoon. Receiving that SMS from Rastam and knowing that he was safe did help and pakdokter was reassured with the belief that Japanese buildings are mostly built to withstand earthquakes like this.
The enormity of this calamity only dawned on pakdokter after pakdokter returned home at 530 pm when the news on TV had reported massive damage from the sweep of the tsunami across north-eastern Japan. Luckily crowded bigger cities like Tokyo were spared, otherwise the death toll would have been unimaginable!
Attempts to contact Rastam failed, understandably their communication systems were down as reported over the TV. Rastam only managed to secure a line and spoke to us over his hand-phone at 8pm to say that he would not be able to return home due to the shut-down of all train services. It was too far for him to walk home. He would be spending the night at an office colleague's flat which happened to be near the office.
He was able later to connect to his internet and had posted some of his own pictures of the event which pakdokter has uploaded here for the record.
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