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...

Where we're from.. Although I wasn't quite sure I'd enjoy teaching English (I'm certified as an elementary education and middle level science teacher), I really had a blast with it! There I am, on the right of the photo, with four of my students: Two from Mexico, one from Somalia, and one from Hong Kong. I also had students in my class from mainland China, Taiwan, India, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Algeria, The Congo, and El Salvador. Working with such a diverse group kept things interesting but also posed certain challenges, not the least of which was trying to accommodate a vast range of proficiency levels. I hope I did right by my students and that I helped them to navigate the English language with a bit more ease! They taught me a lot about how -- and how not -- to teach English effectively.  - by Elizabeth

Patience: the gentle clock hand circles, and what was promised once, will be... The Son - Rainier Maria Rilke, tr. Edward Snow Today, I (Elizabeth) was happy to receive an email confirmation from our placement officer, indicating receipt of my updated resume and our updated availability: Dear Elizabeth, Thank you for your emails. I will add this information to your file now. We will be in touch if we need any additional information. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I suppose there is nothing to do now but wait.  Earlier today, I visited the Peace Corps recruiting office -- I went down to pick up a DVD to show my English class. My students are very curious about the Peace Corps. I had a nice chat with our recruiter while I was there, who told me that there probably won't be much, if any, email or phone communication from the Placement Office from here on out. The next thing to expect, she said, is a big blue envelope on our doorstep....

I (Elizabeth) received an email from the placement office today. They requested an updated resume and also an update on our availability. Updating my resume is a simple matter, I just need to add my volunteer work teaching English at the North Seattle Family Center. The request for updated availability, though, made me stop and think. It never crossed my mind that they'd ask whether our availability date had changed. To be honest, for the past couple weeks I've seriously questioned our ability to be ready by June. Especially since we've traveling for a good two-thirds to three-quarters of May! Here are some of the things we'll need to do before we leave: Tell the co-op that we've been invited to the Peace Corps and will be gone for 27 months. Arrange for our dues to be paid while we're gone (electronic payments? pre-payment? post-dated checks?) and have a plan for any emergencies (i.e. water heater failure). Grant someone, probably our accountant, power-of-a...

Greetings from Elizabeth and Perry! Since we both received our medical clearance today, I (Elizabeth) figured it was about time to start a Peace Corps blog. Things are falling into place and this endeavor may just get off the ground!  To begin, I will briefly recap our journey up until today: Late September, 2011 : Submitted our online applications and references. October, 2011 : Had our interview at the Peace Corps Offices in Seattle, WA. Mid- October, 2011 : At our recruiter's request, I began accruing 30 hours of experience teaching English to adults. Early  November, 2011 : Put our house on the market. Completed my 30 hours - teaching English to adult immigrants/refugees at the North Seattle Family Center and assisting in an ESL class at Shoreline Community College. Submitted documenting paperwork. November 17th, 2011 : Nominated for University English (Perry, who has a PhD in Linguistics) and "Unique Skill" (Elizabeth). Asia, June 2012. Apparently, the ma...