First Day on the Job

Keeping in line with the last week or so it seems and my refusal to sleep, sounds like as good a time as any to share how the first day of staging / last day of America went.

Got to O'hare this morning for my 8:30 flight to Philly after saying final farewells to Mom, Dad, Sarah, and Christine. Had enough time before the flight to bag some Garrett's popcorn for the trip. At the terminal, I ran into two other Peace Corps people, and we stuck together the rest of the trip. Landed in Philly and found out my checked bag wasn't so fortunate - it got on a later flight for some reason. Can't wait to see what luggage problems are to come if I can't even get to Philadelphia with my bags! So we headed to the hotel for registration around 12:30.

At staging, we turned in all of our forms and fun stuff, and then got straight to the icebreakers! It was actually cool, one of those where you have a list of descriptions and have to fill it up with different peoples' signatures. One of them was "Only checked 1 bag," so I think a lot of people were glad to have me sign that one. There were 38 of us there, all education volunteers going to Tanzania. It's a really awesome group. I was a little surprised by the age breakdown - I guess I was expecting more people around my age right out of school, but there were only a couple of those. A lot of people probably in their upper 20's, several around middle-age, and a couple older men who had actually served in the Peace Corps before. It was pretty incredible to get so many varied perspectives and just to listen to where everyone came from and why they were there.

We went through a good deal of orientation activities - talked about expectations of volunteers and what we expect to get out of the next 2 years. Tomorrow will be getting Yellow Fever vaccinations and leaving for a long day of travelling. After we finished today, about half of us went to a Japanese restaurant nearby. We are right in the downtown area of Philly, which is really cool. Then got some monstrously large ice cream cones (at least I did...) and at the ice cream place they were selling the old Bonomo's Turkish Taffy!! I couldn't believe it, but ended up buying one of each flavor. Christine's right, I will have to convince my Tanzanian friends that it is my family business from home haha. Later we went out to a bar near the hotel. In case anyone was wondering, yes it was karaoke night, and some of you might know where I'm going with this... For everyone who gave me the sound advice to just be myself, I can say I held true to that so far by getting a large group of us to sing Stayin' Alive on karaoke, and it was pretty glorious. And my last beer in the States was a Blue Moon, so no complaints there.

After coming back to the hotel, someone else mentioned that she was sad she didn't get to see the Liberty Bell and probably wouldn't have time tomorrow before our flight. I really wanted to see it too, and it was only a few blocks away, so we walked over there around midnight to get a glimpse. Very cool old downtown area, lots of HISTORY! mercy. And when I got back, my bag was finally delivered to the hotel so I get to wear different clothes tomorrow!

And now I'm just still not sleeping for some reason, probably partially attributed to inordinate amount of ice cream I had earlier. We leave tomorrow at 7 for shots, then 10 for Newark Airport - even though I vowed never to return there after spending the night on its floors coming back from London. They split us up into small groups for safe keeping, and I volunteered to be a group leader so I get to hand out everyone's passports at the airport. woo! The flight for Amsterdam doesn't leave til 6:30pm. I think it's about 7 hours, and we have a 2 hour layover, then a 10.5 hour flight to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. When we finally get there, it will be 9:45pm local time, so I will be extremely thrown off for sure. It should be fun though, I'm sure I will finally catch up on sleep then.

Great first day. Just a brief update on the day's happenings, I will post more as soon as I can once we get to Tanzania!