<Begin Segment 17>

TI: So you mentioned that you moved up by the hospital -- my memory might be off, but I've been to Manzanar a few times. Was that... there's also something that's pretty well-known at Manzanar, the orphanage?

MN: Yes, we lived right across the street from the orphanage.

TI: Right, so it was nearby the orphanage.

MN: Yes, across the street from the orphanage.

TI: So did you have much interaction with the kids in the orphanage?

MN: (No). My kid sister did. She made friends with the younger kids there, but I did not. I had already made friends with the girls in our class, and I guess she being in grammar school or junior high, I forgot, because I was already an eleventh grader when we went to camp. So I was able to make friends from the school, but then she did make a few friends in the orphanage. They were a pretty close-knit group, because they had their own kitchen and they were different from our situation. We had to go to a mess hall to eat, take baths and do our ablutions in the whatever, in the public one, but they had their own. They had three huge, beautiful barracks, and made for them, and the boys and the girls were separate, they had their own kitchen and own bathroom and everything. So it was different. But I didn't make friends with them as much, because I had my classmates to make friends with. But we were raised differently from the kids in the orphanage.

TI: The... well, when you think about the orphanage, was the sense, though, the kids were fine, that they were happy? Or did you have a sense of the kids in the orphanage, how their life was?

MN: I didn't really take that into consideration. Just that I thought they lived in a nicer place than we did. [Laughs]

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.