She’s off to save the world – or at least make it a little better.
Mari Otomo, daughter of Squamish’s Junko and Nobuyuki Otomo, owners of Sushi Goemon, will be leaving in May for a three-month practicum at United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) in Hiroshima, Japan.
The Hiroshima office focuses specifically on training UN diplomats and civil servants in post-conflict countries in order to help them build a better country, post-war, Otomo, 33, explained.
“They have a fellowship program with the government of Afghanistan and they also just started a fellowship with South Sudan,” she said.
“They come to Hiroshima and get trained on things like anticorruption, good governance all these things that would help them… at home as they rebuild their government after war.”
Otomo said her role will be to help facilitate and develop content for the workshops the participants will attend.
The practicum is part of her one-year masters in social work program at the University of Calgary, where she is specializing in international and community development, she said.
Ultimately, she would like to work on children’s rights issues.
“My goal would be to see the day in which children’s rights all over the world are being recognized and upheld, so however I can contribute to that goal in some way would be ideal for me.”
Her desire to work on a global scale partially came out of a summer after high school she spent in Ghana, doing development work while earning her political science degree from Simon Fraser University.
“That sort of solidified my passion for international development work,” she said.
She later attended the University of British Columbia where she earned bachelor in social work with a focus on child welfare.
“With my masters, what I wanted to focus on is combining my passion for international development with my specialization in child welfare,” she said. “I thought it might be a good opportunity for me to understand what the process of building a country looks like post war because there are lots of implications for children as well. If you have good government, you will be able to make proper policies that will impact programs and laws surrounding children’s welfare.”
Stepping up to help is not new to Otomo’s family.
When relatives on her father’s side were affected by the March 2011 tsunami in Japan, her family went to the area to volunteer at an animal rescue organization set up after the tsunami hit.
Her sister, Aki, is now studying to become a veterinarian.
“These are the ways in which my parents, specifically my mother, has fostered the importance of giving back to the community and fostered curiosity in us,” Otomo said.
Otomo’s mother, Junko, was an interpreter for the Cuban embassy in Japan for many years and that influenced how her two daughters saw the world.
Her father, Nobuyuki, travelled the world working on a cargo ship.
“We grew up in a very international home,” she said. “We had foreigners in our house often.”
