Ready or not...

Today's the day! Staging (orientation to everyone else) was a good experience. Sunday I met the 30 other people with whom I'll be going through this adventure. I am not the oldest, but I may be the second oldest. There is one gentleman whose age I will not hazard a guess, but I'm definitely not the oldest. There are some others who are around my age, but a bit younger. There are also others who've had some teaching and work experience, but for the most part everyone is fresh out of college with in the last few months to within the last year or so. Everyone seems great so far. With a bunch of math/science people who all think alike, we're bound to get along. Staging was full of activities to get to know one another while at the same time preparing us for this huge undertaking in front of us. We looked through the history of PC, how we fit in, what it might feel like to be the new person in town as well as to be a person living in the village with a volunteer coming in and other such in-service type activities.

This morning we head off to vaccination clinic where I'll receive my yellow fever vaccine as well as my first does of malaria medication. Then we board a bus to JFK to catch a flight to Amsterdam. Then it's off to Dar es Salaam via Kiliminjaro. We'll arrive in TZ about 24 hours after we take off. Yep, I have to be wearing a skirt when I get off the plane... but not on the plane, so I'll be changing on the flight. Then we spend 3 days basically sequestered in Dar before being driven to a TZ training site in the Morogoro region. For security purposes, I cannot post exactly where in that region we'll be located, but if you want to know you can send me an email & I can tell you. We'll spend 2 days at a training center before being shipped off to our host families, also in the Morogoro region. Then starts intensive language, culture, technical, health & safety training. I'll be with 5 people for 8 hours a day 5 days a week and then the entire group on the 6th day. It should be pretty intense, but I'm looking forward to it.

I may not get to internet for at least a week, so keep the snail mail coming & if you email just don't expect to hear back for awhile!