Thursday, March 31, 2011
The Packing Crunch
24 hours out and packing is proving to be quite challenge. Even me the nomad is finding it difficult to consolidate my life into 2 checked bags + a duffel. However, I know that by the time I'm ready to go to Charlotte airport on Thursday that I will have spent way more time agonizing about packing than was really necessary and I also have a feeling that a year from now I'll laugh at how stressful I thought this was. In fact it's a bit liberating to downsize my life this much. It boggles my mind to think that on Sunday I'll be in Gaborone, Botswana about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime, serving for and working with the Peace Corps in Botswana. Wow!
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Welcome to my Botswana Blog
Dumela (hello) everyone! I have finally gotten around to creating a blog about the exciting new chapter in my life - serving in the Peace Corps and working with the Botswana government in HIV/AIDS Capacity Building and NGO Development. I leave on Thursday 3/31 for Staging in Philadelphia and then leave for good on Saturday 4/2 for Gaborone. We leave NY-JFK at 11:15 am on Saturday and will be flying South African Airways non-stop to Johannesburg, South Africa - a short jaunt of 16 hours and then connect to our 1 hour flight to Gaborone and will arrive in Gaborone at 1:30 pm on Sunday afternoon. Ambien and Xanax will be my good friends during that 24 hour period.
There are 41 others going with me to serve/work in Botswana with the Peace Corps and I've met a few through Facebook. We will spend our first week in Gaborone going through an intense orientation and preparing for our Pre-Service Training (PST) which will begin on April 8. Our PST will take place in Kanye, at the Peace Corps training village. In Kanye we will live with host families (advanced cultural immersion to say the least), while undergoing Setswana language, Botswana cultural and job-specific training through the beginning of June. Once we complete PST we will be sworn into Peace Corps service on June 7 and then will report to our post. I will be working as a District Coordinator Liaison with the Botswana government in their HIV/AIDS programs at a location that will be finalized during my PST.
During PST I will have pretty limited access to internet so my blog posts may be infrequent at best. Once I start my job in June I believe I will have more consistent internet access and hope to be able to post to this blog with increased frequency to give all of you who want to follow the blog a sense of what daily life is like in Botswana and the work I'll be doing with the Peace Corps. I can't promise the most visually stimulating blog with fancy design templates but I do hope that the content itself will be interesting to those of you who sign up to follow the blog and I'm sure once I get the hang of it my blog posts will be reach "must-read" status with all of you waiting in eager anticipation for my latest post.
I look forward to staying in touch via the blog and maybe seeing some of you in Southern Africa in 2012 or 2013.
There are 41 others going with me to serve/work in Botswana with the Peace Corps and I've met a few through Facebook. We will spend our first week in Gaborone going through an intense orientation and preparing for our Pre-Service Training (PST) which will begin on April 8. Our PST will take place in Kanye, at the Peace Corps training village. In Kanye we will live with host families (advanced cultural immersion to say the least), while undergoing Setswana language, Botswana cultural and job-specific training through the beginning of June. Once we complete PST we will be sworn into Peace Corps service on June 7 and then will report to our post. I will be working as a District Coordinator Liaison with the Botswana government in their HIV/AIDS programs at a location that will be finalized during my PST.
During PST I will have pretty limited access to internet so my blog posts may be infrequent at best. Once I start my job in June I believe I will have more consistent internet access and hope to be able to post to this blog with increased frequency to give all of you who want to follow the blog a sense of what daily life is like in Botswana and the work I'll be doing with the Peace Corps. I can't promise the most visually stimulating blog with fancy design templates but I do hope that the content itself will be interesting to those of you who sign up to follow the blog and I'm sure once I get the hang of it my blog posts will be reach "must-read" status with all of you waiting in eager anticipation for my latest post.
I look forward to staying in touch via the blog and maybe seeing some of you in Southern Africa in 2012 or 2013.
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