As of yesterday, I am officially a Peace Corps Trainee! Being a PCT is just one step (and 11 weeks away) from becoming an actual PCV (volunteer). I’m sitting in the Dallas airport waiting for my flight down to Ecuador (via Miami) and I’m just in disbelief that I’m finally here. It’s been such a long process, filled with waiting and paperwork and more waiting… And now it feels like everything is moving at warp speed! I arrived to Dallas on Tuesday afternoon and met a few of my fellow volunteers that evening. Yesterday (Wednesday) we had registration and orientation, where I officially met the other 36 volunteers in my training group, Omnibus 107. There are 10 men, 27 women; 3 married couples; 18 volunteers in my program (Natural Resource Conservation) and the rest are TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) volunteers. We all have such diverse backgrounds, but we have at least two things in common: 1.We all went through the same arduous application process and 2. We are in the first group of volunteers to go to Ecuador this year, the 50th year of volunteers in Ecuador since the program started in 1962. We’ll all be together for the next 11 weeks of training, and then we’ll be sworn in on April 4th and disperse to our sites. I’ll write more about all of that when I find out more, of course.
Today will be an extremely long day of travel. We checked out of our hotel at 3:30 am, left for the airport at 4, and after a full day of travel will arrive in Quito at 7pm. Of course, it’s still another hour by bus to the Peace Corps Training Center in Tumbaco, where we will spend the next two nights before meeting our host families. Meeting my family is probably what I am most anxious for at this moment, but it comes and goes with a dozen other anxieties and worries. For now, I’m just focusing on getting on that plane!
PS- Shout outs to American Airlines’ Dallas crew, who waived ALL additional checked bag fees as well as overweight bag fees for our group because “we do such good work”! It would have been easy money to charge us all for our second bags (and although I was barely under the baggage weight limit, I think I was in the minority!) so it was music to our weary ears at 4:30 this morning :)
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