The invitation has arrived! Mozambique!!!!!!

It’s here!!!!  My invitation arrived in the mail on Tuesday, and I’m going to Mozambique!!!  It was a beautiful moment because it was late, after 7pm, and I’d given up on it arriving.  Both of my grandparents and my aunt and uncle and their kids and my parents were outside at the house to look at my car, so I had this big pile of family around me when the UPS truck showed up with my invitation.  When I opened it, I yelled and jumped up and down over and over and over again!

It’s taken me this long to update because I have been so busy scrambling to get everything done as fast as possible.  I am so close to the staging date that I don’t want to risk having something go wrong with my paperwork and the invitation packet is so full of information and forms and various steps that even I (the paperwork queen) am having difficulty keeping it all straight.

So how do I feel?  I feel like I’ve won the lottery in terms of my assignment.  Literally.  I had images in my brain of Lesotho (the other potential country I could have been placed in) and from the various blogs I’d read, it is a chilly mountain country just going into winter and volunteers were talking about being freezing cold all of the time.  Plus, when I had imagined where I would like to serve if I could choose, climate-wise it would be somewhere warm and tropical (at least most of the time), but I also hoped for a place faced with challenges where I could feel like I could use my knowledge and skills to make a difference.  I was very (very) drawn to Africa.  So Mozambique is a perfect fit and I am absolutely ecstatic!

What will I be doing?  My placement is as a Community Health Promoter, which is slightly different from what I imagined, but I am still thrilled!  It sounds like there is a lot of work in NGO Advising (my specialty) within the program, working around issues of HIV/AIDS, orphaned children, outreach and education and other health issues.  I’m slightly intimidated, because health isn’t my area of expertise, but I am so ready for this challenge!

What language will I be learning? An added bonus is that one of my concerns about serving in Africa was learning a language that would be extremely geographically specific.  In Mozambique, there are local African languages, but the primary language is Portuguese, which transfers very well to learning Spanish and spoken in a number of places.  When this girl gets home, she will be tan and fluent in Portuguese.  Can you believe it?!

So what now? Well, I’ve sent off my Peace Corps passport application, visa application, PR materials, updated resume and aspiration statement to the country staff and have a packing list.  I am assuming that I will be flying to Philadelphia for staging on May 30.  Thanks to my lovely employer, I have work through the week before I leave (which is a massive blessing financially).  In addition, I have a huge running list (growing faster than I can check things off of it).  Including:

·         Sell my car;

·         Sort and pack my things for storage;

·         Buy the supplies I’ll need;

·         Pay off my credit cards;

·         Save as much money as I can;

·         Start daily Portuguese language training at LiveMocha;

·         Sell some other miscellaneous stuff;

·         Read up on Mozambique;

·         Finish recovering a chair and an art project that I’ve started;

·         Pack, pack, pack and pack!

The long and short of it is that I am beyond thrilled.  I am so excited and relieved and happy and nervous and I’ve been walking around with a huge smile on my face randomly screaming “MOZAMBIQUE!!!!!” at the top of my lungs.  So life is good.

Waiting and Like to Read Ahead? Get Your Peace Corps Documents Online!

This will be brief, I just wanted to share a resource that I've been using.  It's called, Scribd, and if you're not familiar, it is a great source for documents from agencies that you can't get on their sites or anywhere else.  For example, in advance of receiving my packet, I've been able to read instructions for completing my aspiration statement and updated resume, as well as download training resources and the welcome book for both countries that I could be invited to.

Hope you enjoy!

Scribd Peace Corps Documents

I've been INVITED!!!!

I’ve been invited!  I will blog again when I have the invitation in my hand, which is hopefully today or tomorrow, but wanted to put something up here. 

On April 6, I realized that it had been a month since I had been told that my file would be preliminarily reviewed and so I emailed my placement assistant to inquire about the status.  This is what I received in return:

Serah,

I hope that this finds you well.  I would like to inform you that your file has gone through our preliminary review and is complete.  I will now pass it on to a Placement Specialist for further review to best match your skill set to an available program departing in the coming months.  You can expect to hear from her in approximately 4-6 weeks regarding possible placement options that best match your skill set.  I encourage you (as I do all of our applicants) to take this time to continue to gain additional professional/volunteer experience relevant to the program in which you were nominated to.  This will allow you to stand out as an applicant and also make you a stronger resource in a future host community.

I was feeling really distraught about the email, because I had been thinking that this email would be the one that told me where they were considering placing me and instead I was facing another month and half of the unknown.  I assumed that this meant that it would be five months at least before I would be leaving and had to create a new plan.

So, I started looking for other jobs.  The next day, I set up an interview (thanks to the help of my Mother’s extensive net of local contacts) for a summer job, and resigned myself to more waiting.

Then, later that afternoon on the 7^th, I got a phone call from a 202 area-code and I didn’t recognize it so I didn’t pick up.  I listened to the message when it finally registered in my brain that it was a D.C. area code and it was a Placement Officer asking me to call her back that day.  I called back immediately and she apologized for the short notice and then asked if we could talk for a little bit.  My heart was pounding out of my chest, but I didn’t want to dare to hope. 

She asked me a number of questions similar to those I was asked in my initial interview. She was mostly just checking-in with me about the challenges of being a volunteer and my expectations of my Peace Corps service.  Then she asked me about geographical flexibility and any preferences I had, and then when I was prepared to leave.  I explained that I knew I wasn’t supposed to make any major life changes until I had my invitation, but that I’d had to, and so I was simply waiting for my invitation to leave.  She said “Well, I’m very glad to hear that, because congratulations, we would like to invite you to serve in Africa leaving on May 31^st in non-profit advising!”.  I immediately started bawling and when I asked her if people regularly cried on the phone with her, she responded that they did and that sometimes they screamed.  I literally cried through the rest of the conversation, but she had a great sense of humor about it. 

I checked the wiki almost immediately and learned that there were two programs leaving on May 31, both of which had non-profit advising programs.  Lesotho and Mozambique.  I’d initially thought that Mozambique had a French-speaking requirement, so was convinced it was Lesotho.  A friend corrected me though and I realized that it is a primarily Portuguese. 

I’m crossing my fingers for Mozambique, but either way I am absolutely THRILLED!  I will update more as soon as I have my invitation.

Here’s to all those applicants out there hoping every day for their placement.  There is HOPE!  And it doesn’t always work the way that they say it will, so stay in touch and stay positive!