Decisions, decisions

We really are swamped - not just with tasks, but also with decisions:
• Our schedule when we go to San Francisco on Thursday? There's just not enough time for everybody.
• When to fit in everything in our schedule, especially everybody who is coming to visit? We might still have one weekend that's not booked with visits or travel - maybe that's when we'll pack all our stuff!
• What to bring? Do we lug our winter clothes in May or ask someone to ship them? Do I need new hiking boots? Can we find a 110V surge protector here? What are appropriate presents for host families in a country where GDP per capita was about $3,000 last year? What kind of luggage should we bring? How can we fit it all in two suitcases weighing 100 pounds?

What do teachers wear in Armenia? We hear they dress pretty well - far from blue jeans, usually.

Of course, it really doesn't help that I have to mull each decision carefully for a few weeks. I believe it's obvious that it's not Susan who is writing this.

Days left: 94

We're going to Armenia!

The invite arrived today. Susan called me (Fred, of course) at work before opening the envelope. We were thrilled to find out it's Armenia, as we had hoped and suspected. Teaching English, of course, in a secondary school, although that could mean college, not just high school.

We suddenly have a whole lot to do before May 27, our departure date. For now, the Peace Corps is asking for all kinds of paperwork. Moving out is only part of it - we need to prepare for living in Armenia and our lives need to go on without us here in the US until sometime like September 2012.

Mail and more

It's been eight days since we were told the letter with the invite would be arriving in a week. In other words, I've had plenty of time to consider how the Federal bureaucracy works. One person makes the decision to invite us to some Peace Corps job; another writes the actual letter; yet another person or two have to sign it. Each step probably requires only a few hours. This is where the union procedures come into full play and things get fun: a day for the letter to be placed in the envelope; another day and another high-pension Federal worker to take it to the mail room; etc. And then I realized that Washington DC had been shut down by multiple feet of snow for several days. Bummer. I really wanted someone to blame.

We now pin our hopes on Tuesday.

Welcome to our Peace Corps blog

We're pretty excited here in Cambridge, MA: yesterday we got word from our Peace Corps placement officer that we have been invited to serve in the Peace Corps and that the invite is in the mail. We're going to somewhere in Eastern Europe to teach English, leaving in late May. We suspect it will be either Armenia or Romania, but we should know both our destination and the exact date of departure in a few days – at which time we can start learning the appropriate language.

We will both be contributing to this site (Susan is writing this now) as we go forward, but I'll bet you are asking yourself--why on earth are Susan and Fred going into the Peace Corps?  It's actually something we started talking about years ago before Fred became a U.S. citizen.  Last year we had decided we wanted to go somewhere and teach English as a Second Language.  The only problem was we didn't have any idea how to do that.

So, we enrolled in a school in Boston and got certified as ESL teachers. During the course of that class, one of our classmates was talking about submitting an application to the Peace Corps. Bingo! The seed was planted, and we first submitted our applications last March. No small feat, considering that they needed ALL of our college transcripts, lists of everywhere we had ever lived, and about 37 pages of Q&A. We were interviewed in the Boston office in April--our recruiter had served in Armenia, and we really hoped to get nominated for Eastern Europe. When our nomination arrived on June 9, it was indeed to be ESL teachers in Eastern Europe for May 2010.

The next step was to complete our medical forms, get our physicals, and submit all our paperwork. That took another six weeks or so, but everything was finally submitted in early August. By October, we still hadn't heard a word from the medical office and were starting to get concerned. A few phone calls and e-mails seemed to start things in motion again, and after some additional medical tests, doctor's notes and the like, we finally received medical clearance two days before Christmas. Passing medical was a huge relief as this is what most often keeps people from becoming volunteers.

Our file then went to the placement office. We got an e-mail in early January that they would be reviewing our file in the next few weeks. Patience pays off, but so do phone calls and e-mails. I (Susan) did both, and the result is that we had a telephone interview last week, and became "Invitees" the next day. Now we wait to find out where and when.

We have long talked about wanting to do something to make a difference in the world. Each of us has made small contributions to our community, but we wanted to do something on a more global level. We really wanted a place where we could give back some of what has been given to us, and teaching ESL and doing that with the Peace Corps is an incredible opportunity.

Now we have a million things to do.