Des pays et des gares...

So begins the text of the official acceptance statement Perry and I emailed to the Peace Corps yesterday. After inserting our personalized information, of course :). We arrived home from our cruise yesterday and our neighbor had our Peace Corps invitation packet! It was delivered UPS -- we had USPS on vacation hold and we were afraid we'd have to wait until Tuesday for our packet. So, the suspense has ended and we're officially invited to...insert small drum roll here...South Africa! According to our packet, we'll be serving in either the Mpumalanga or Kwa-Zulu Natal province. It should be pretty interesting trying to learn a click language like isiZulu! Both of us will be school teachers at the primary level, which for Peace Corps South Africa purposes is grades 1-7. We could end up in a classroom with no teacher (due to demotivation, illness, or even death due to AIDS) and as many as 100+ students. We could be living in a mud hut with a thatch roof or a brick hou

In the wee hours of the morning, I had a gut feeling that the Peace Corps might have updated our status, so I grabbed my iPod and checked my email. Updates occur sometime in the middle of the night, and sure enough, there was a message in my inbox saying they'd updated my application status. An invitation perhaps? After incorrectly typing in my password  -- twice -- I managed to log on and was greeted by the happy message: "Congratulations! You have been invited to become a Peace Corps Volunteer." I got out of bed and found Perry. He hadn't yet checked his email, so I showed him my updated status. Of course, I couldn't get back to sleep after that! Wow! This is really happening! Our invitation packets were mailed yesterday, so we hope to get them before we board our cruise to Alaska on Sunday. We won't know where we'll be going our when we'll be leaving until those packets arrive. We're pretty certain that the invitations are for Africa,

Perry and I both received the same email notification this morning: "Peace Corps has updated your Application Status." The new check mark today is the one next to "Place." Needless to say, we were both quite excited about this....but we became even more excited after receiving the following email: Hello Elizabeth and Perry, I hope you are both doing well. I am the Placement and Assessment Specialist responsible for conducting a final review of your applications for placement. Below you will find questions that will help with my review. Please email your responses or contact me by Friday – May 11th to schedule a time to talk through your responses. Holy cow...getting more real, right? The list our placement specialist wants answered includes quite a few questions that we were asked at our recruitment interview, but there are some new questions -- how have we been preparing for our Peace Corps service, have our motivations changed, and have we spoke