CAITLIN WHITE
Staff Writer
Only three months after getting married, Pepperdine alumni Kelly and Mark Barneche decided to move to Japan to teach English to elementary school children.
The couple first learned about the outreach to schools in Mito, Japan through Kelly’s father, Dr. Robert Carpenter who is a professor of Missions and World Religions at Oklahoma Christian University.
“We just decided to go,” Kelly said. “Mark had always been interested in Japanese culture. He used to take karate and had a lot of Japanese friends growing up, and after I went to Japan with ‘Let’s Start Talking’, I was eager to go back.”
“Let’s Start Talking” is a nationwide non-profit organization that teaches English to native people in foreign countries.
The couple moved to Japan in April of 2005 and have been there since. They teach in two different schools. Mark works with kindergarteners, and Kelly works with anywhere from 1st through 6th graders.
The city of Mito hires Americans, Canadians and Australians to be assistant English teachers in most of their elementary school classrooms.
“We team teach with the Japanese home room teachers,” Kelly said. “Many of the teachers don’t speak a lot of English, so they can’t teach it as a second language, and that is where we come in.”
Mito is the capitol city of one of Japan’s prefectures, or states. There are about 35 English teachers in the Barneche’s group, including other Pepperdine graduates, Crystelle Phillips and Janet Pomeroy.
When they left for Japan, neither Mark nor Kelly spoke Japanese, and they said the communication barrier has consistently been the hardest problem they have had to face.
“In school, sometimes only one teacher is certified to speak English, and the rest are just using the English they learned in junior high, and they don’t really like to speak English.
“Communication is an issue every day, sometimes it’s very frustrating, but it can also be funny,” Kelly said.
The Barneches were high school sweethearts and met their junior year when Kelly’s family moved to Oklahoma from Santa Barbara. Both grew up in the Church of Christ tradition and hearing about Pepperdine. After leaving California, Kelly said she was eager to come back.
They parted ways when school started their freshman year but got back together as juniors.
While at Pepperdine, Kelly was involved with the Golden Key, was a two year campus ministry intern and studied abroad in Heidelberg.
Mark also studied abroad in Heidelberg, was a Project Serve team leader on an outreach to Philadelphia and was a campus ministry intern for two years as well.
The idea of moving to a whole new culture right after the huge change of getting married would have been shocking to some but not the Barneches.
“I actually think it helped diffuse the stress of being newly married,” Mark said. “We had bigger things to worry about, like how to buy things at the store and how to communicate with people around us. We didn’t have time to worry about how we were adjusting to married life.”
The Barneches have been in Japan for two full school years now and are planning to head back to the states in a few months.
In the future, both hope to attend graduate school. Mark plans to get a Master’s degree in science and nursing and eventually be a nurse practitioner, and Kelly wants to work with refugees, so a degree in social work would be ideal.
“I’d also gladly accept any faculty positions that come open at Pepperdine,” Mark joked.
The two said they foresee more world travel in their future, and their plans for future vocation definitely reflect that.
“Neither of us is especially attached to living in America, and especially with goals like nursing and refugee work, I have a feeling we will live abroad again in our lives,” Kelly said.
03-22-2007