The first day for a Peace Corps volunteer happens at a city in the United States where the departure group is gathered, registered, briefly trained, and sent away. For us, this happened in Philadelphia on January 14th.
In the weeks leading up to our staging and departure date, Julie and I were privileged to have quality time to spend with both of our families. After countless dinners, card games, and movie marathons, we bid our families adieu and shipped out to our staging location in Philadelphia. We travelled by train to Philly and arrived the morning of registration with enough time to bag some naps and some cheesesteak sandwiches for lunch. Staging was held in a nice hotel near the historic district. Somewhere between reading the historical markers on what seemed like every building and walking together down the snaggletooth-brick roads, a familiar assurance came to me that we were in the right place doing the right thing.
Before registration Julie and I tried to distinguish between the locals and our fellow Peace Corps Volunteers. We looked forward (and still do) to meeting new friends and making lasting relationships. After lunch we walked back to the hotel to attend registration at noon. There are 97 volunteers in our departing group, one of the largest groups to ship to Morocco at one time. Despite the volume of volunteers I am still amazed at the smoothness and professionalism displayed by the Peace Corps staff who organized, lead, and facilitated registration and staging. Julie and I enjoyed every second of staging. After making sure we had all the proper paperwork, we lead off with icebreakers where we introduced ourselves and met as many other volunteers as we could. The only thing more impressive than the caliber of the Peace Corps staff who facilitated staging, is the diversity and caliber of our fellow volunteers. Young, seasoned, single, married, black, white, and everything in between, our colleagues are incredible people. Julie and I were taken aback by their personable natures and capacity to lead which became evident as we participated in question and answer sessions, group directed learning experiences where we acted out skits to teach each other about the Peace Corps core expectations, and shared our anxieties and aspirations with each other through art. A highlight for me was to hear anecdotes from the field from a returned volunteer from Morocco. In short, staging was an amazing experience that hopefully set the tone for our service by helping us develop already meaningful relationships, learn from others, and help us feel more prepared to serve others.
We are now somewhere over the Atlantic cruising at 551 mph toward the cold land with the hot sun and could not be traveling fast enough.
2 comments:
Yay! We're excited to have you. Look us up when you're in country!
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