On the Plane

From June 6...

I’m on the plane from JFK to Johannesburg now and have some down time (15 hours of it to be precise) so I’ll talk a little about the last few days. Oh yeah Mom, don’t even worry, I just did a little walk around the plane, blood clots got nothing on me. My first official event with the Peace Corps was what they call “Staging.” My class all met in a conference room in a hotel in Philadelphia for seven hours or so. We did some paperwork and officially moved from Peace Corps Invitees to Peace Corps Trainees. We won’t become full-fledged Peace Corps Volunteers until August 15^th, when we will have our swearing in Ceremony, which is apparently a fairly fancy-smancy event. When we got our PC passports I was a little disappointed – it’s just a normal old passport with a little sticker on it saying I’m a Peace Corps volunteer. How boring, sad. But, it does have my Tanzania visa in it, which is pretty cool, so I guess it’s okay.

I had some confusion on the number of volunteers that would be going with me; it turns out there are 47 of us in my “class.” There are a total of 160 volunteers in Tanzania. What I didn’t know is there are multiple stagings each year for Tanzania because they are broken up by the type of job you’ll be doing. So my staging was an education specific one. There are volunteers in Tanzania involved in environmental and health sectors as well, but those trainees get their own staging events.

So staging was about what you’d expect it to be. It was a bunch of people meeting for the first time, and about to head off to a really different environment together. There were lots of get to know you activities, and then a bunch of high level discussions about expectations, fears, safety issues, and the like. It was pretty interesting and a great way to start getting to know people.  My fellow trainees seem like a really great group of people. Everyone was pumped up to finally be going and made what could have been a pretty dry conference really fun. I guess this should have been obvious, but I was really struck by the geographical spread of people backgrounds. I think there were three other Washingtonians, but there were folks from every region of the States.  My roommate at staging was a guy from Pennsylvania. Amazingly, a few months ago he met a friend of mine who I studied abroad with and went to college with. Small world! Most were fairly recent grads, though there were a few older people too. Though there were some people who had just graduated a few weeks ago, probably the typical situation was someone who graduated a few years ago and wanted a break from the normal working world. I’m not sure about my group specifically but I guess the average age of Peace Corps volunteers is 28.

So after staging ended, we I was planning on getting a little sleep before the 2:00am departure time for the airport. Instead I went out and celebrated the birthday of another trainee and didn’t end up using the hotel room except for storing my luggage and a quick shower. No regrets! I didn’t get much sleep the night before staging either though, so I’m running on fumes. Strangely, I took a couple hour nap on the plane already and feel good to go again. It’ll hit me at some point…

We got to the airport hours before we could check our bags (better safe than sorry I guess), so here we are with all our luggage sprawled out on a floor of the lobby. Sorry for the terrible image quality.

The last 36 hours or so have been pretty intense, but I’d say my first day and a half with the Peace Corps has been pretty great. We’ll see what the next 36 hours brings.