June 4, 2011
PST: Orientation, Week 1
Monday, May 30
After 6 hours of travel, I arrived in Philadelphia where I met up with Vicente, a fellow Trainee on my flight, as well as with Dylan and Morgan. We took two taxis to the hotel. After checking into my room, I found Maddy, my Philly roommate, who had arrived at 1pm reading on the bed. We introduced and then I changed my clothes (92 degrees and 100% humidity), and then wandered down to the convenience store to pull out some cash. Coming back to the hotel, it was evident who the other volunteers were coming in, they were all slightly wide eyed and loaded down with tons of luggage.
At 6pm we headed to check-in and began the process of becoming official trainees. We turned in the rest of our paperwork and received our walk-around allowance, all the while chatting with the other trainees in the line. As soon as we finished the paperwork, we agreed to all meet up and head to dinner. Once everyone finally arrived in the lobby, we took off down the streets of downtown Philadelphia, a long line of gawking, yakking and laughing new friends. After much aimless wandering we found a little Irish Pub, and they set us up a long table in the back. Part of my mission while in Philly was to consume a Philly cheesesteak. I have to say in retrospect that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to have my Philly cheesesteak experience take place in an Irish Pub. The meat was dry and there was very little flavor. All in all, my cheesesteak experience was a disappointment. After dinner and a couple drinks, exhaustion set in over the crowd and we wandered back to the hotel. Both Maddy and I were extremely exhausted, so sleep set in quickly.
Tuesday, May 31
We had to be in the lobby at 7:15 to head to the clinic, so we woke up at 6:15 (4:15am according to my body). Breakfast was bad fruit and semi-passable coffee and then it was off to the medical appointment. Another long line of gawking tourists wandering down the streets of Philly. Our hotel straddled the edge of downtown and the poorer section, and our walk took us down a pretty interesting street. We ended up at a government building where the lot of us headed through security. It was very much like being on a field trip in elementary school. After security, we lined up against the wall in alphabetical order (again, elementary school), and were split into two groups. One group of us headed to the cafeteria to wait and one to the clinic. I was in the first group, so I sat in the cafeteria getting to know some of my fellow volunteers. There was much swapping of medical mishaps and it was a relief to realize how many people had so much more trouble than I did. There are also quite a few people who had been nominated to programs in Latin America or had been nominated to education programs but ended up being invited to this program at the last minute. After about 45 minutes we headed up to the clinic where we signed some more papers and waited for our shots. To our collective relief, it was just a single shot today for yellow fever. It went quickly. The clinic ended by 9:30am and we were told to meet back up at the hotel for staging at 1pm. Set free, I headed back to the hotel to change and then met up with Maddy and Jack to walk to the Liberty Bell. I’m not much of one for history, and I hadn’t really made the connection as to how patriotic of a city Philly was (which makes sense when I actually think about it), but it was interested nonetheless to see such historic landmarks. The line for the bell was long, but luckily there was a viewing area from outside, so we could see it and read about the history. The main thing that struck me was that the bell was meant to represent liberty, and cracked almost immediately upon arriving to the United States. I found it to be the most perfectly ironic metaphor. We wandered around Independence Hall a bit and then headed back through the city to our hotel to meet some other volunteers for lunch. For lunch we ate at Terminal Market, where I had some last minute Mexican food. Maddy and I sat with Joe, another volunteer, who is taking a hiatus from his work in the health field and got to know him a little bit over our food. We then headed back to the hotel for our afternoon meeting.
Headed into the room, it was filled with tables covered in markers and name-tags and staging notebooks and we spent the rest of the afternoon in that room discussing the kinds of issues that may come up, how to deal with stress, our fears and anxieties about service, and reviewing what it means to be a peace corps volunteer. Afterwards, the group of us headed to Red Robin for dinner, where the management gave us a box of Hershey’s chocolate to celebrate our upcoming service. After dinner, Maddy and I to a little walk around Philly to digest and then headed back up to our room to begin the process of repacking for what felt like the millionth time. We had a number of last minute things to do to get ready to take off and ended up going to sleep at around 1 am.
Wednesday, June 1
At 2:30 am the alarm went off and we got up, grabbed our heavy bags and headed to the lobby to load up on the bus. By 3:30 pm we were in our seats and headed down the road. A fellow volunteer, Eric, forgot his expensive new international phone in the lobby of the hotel and spent the beginning of the bus ride trying to figure out how to get it shipped to Africa. I slept off and on for most of the 3 hour bus ride, but woke up as we entered New York City, the first time I had been there besides a brief stop at Newark Airport a few years ago. I enjoyed getting to travel through the city so early in the morning, and was craning my neck trying to absorb as much of the cityscape as possible. We arrived at JFK at 6:30 in the morning and spent a confusing 30 minutes trying to figure out what gate we would be flying out of. Once we established that we would be checking in at South African Airlines, we unloaded all of our baggage and the whole group settled in to wait for the ticket counter to open. Most of us spent this time weighing our bags at the unmanned ticket counter and shifting things around to fit into the weight limit as well as searching for coffee and snacks. When the ticket counter opened, we all lined up to start the long process of checking in only to be told that our tickets weren’t valid and that we would all need to go to another place to get the issue resolve. We soon discovered that someone at the airline had accidentally voided our reservation and the next 45 minutes was a chaotic mess of bags and confusion in the line as they reprinted tickets one-by-one. After that mess, security was a breeze, as was waiting for the plane. I have never been on a huge international flight, and walking down the gangway to the huge plane was a surreal experience. We settled into our seats, and into the reality that we were actually going to be flying to Africa in a few minutes.
I'm going to cut this short, because as I write this, my cousin Lena is staring at the screen seemingly fascinated by the fact that words are appearing on the page as I type, so I think I will wrap this up and add more later!
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