It Begins...

Staging
I'm here in Miami at the Crowne Plaza hotel, my last little taste of luxury for some time. The past few days have been our Staging, the orientation to get us ready to go to Paraguay later tonight. "Us" is 37 trainees, about 30 girls and 7 guys, most of whom will be with the Rural Health/Sanitation program, and about 10 with Urban Youth Development, and then about 8 of us with Early Elementary Education. The past few days have been exciting and overwhelming, we're all anxious and ready to start this big adventure. The trainings have been very general, an introduction really to issues we'll go over in more depth during the next few months, like safety and security or peace corps policies. We'll get lots and lots of specifics later on, and I'm glad they're not throwing too much information at us at once.

The people here are great - obviously we share similar interests and values, so it's easy to make friends. It feels a bit like college, actually, where you know these people are your new best friends so some people want to stay up all night and talk. I, however, being an old fart, have been in bed at 9pm every night! Probably more than half of the trainees just graduated from college, which makes me feel old, but there are a few of us who are older too (including one retirement-aged guy, and another guy who already did a Peace Corps stint in Micronesia!).

My luggage ended up a little differently than I had planned, and one bag went over my 50 pound limit in Boston. But I've reorganized, and can now report that my big green travelling backpack weighs in at 45lbs, and the big red duffel bag (replacing the humongous blue bag I took a picture of) weighs only 25lbs. I'm also carrying on the plane my backpack (superheavy w/ laptop) and sleeping bag that doesn't fit in any luggage. It seems everyone else has packed similarly, which makes me happy.

Getting to Paraguay
This part got complicated when our flight was cancelled yesterday, but fortunately Peace Corps handles all those logistics. We ended up being divided into six groups leaving at various times today. My group gets an overnight flight to Buenos Aires, then SEVEN hours in the airport there before a final flight to Asuncion, where we'll all regroup at some Peace Corps center there.
We'll begin PST, pre-service training, on Friday, which will include vaccinations :( and then head out to our host families.

Our central training area is in the town of Guarambare, about an hour outside of the capital. But, we'll be broken into our groups (education, etc) to stay in little villages outside Guarambare with host families, which means that most of my time will be spent w/ the other education volunteers for language and technical job training. Then we'll have weekly trainings as a whole group too on cultural issues or health or things like that.

Guarambare apparently has internet, so I'm expecting I'll be able to go online at least weekly.

I'm sure I have lots more things to share, but I'm a little tired and overwhelmed so I think I'll end there. I'm heading to the KMart down the street to pick up some snacks and maybe a Sudoku book for the plane/airport, and then I'm off....