lome

okay i have like 10 minutes to write this on a tiny laptop, sorry for the errors. Everything is going well so far. Togo is AMAZING. I absolutely love it here because the people have been so nice and the communities and culture is drastically different from anything I have ever experienced. We have 1 more day of orientation then i will be with my host family in a town an hour from lome. during this time i will not be able to get cell phone coverage so i will not be buying one until august. untill then i will try to make it to the internet cafe a bit even though that is quite expensive. I am really looking forward to being with my host family so I can constantly harass them with french questions. The Peace Corps has been incredible during our orientation process as well. They are well respected within the country and they have really given our training group alot of confidence going forward. In case you were wondering, I will be taking bucket showers and using a latrine as my toilet. yay for camp bill o wood all over again. hope everything is going well back in the states and to my dad, i will send you the financial aid
deferment papers whenever i can get to the post office.

random notes: food here is delicious, very healthy and I have not had 1 thing that I do not like as of yet.

most things here are WAY cheap, exp. 22 oz beer at a bar down the road is like the equivalent of 1 american dollar

lots of random chickens running in the street, one today was eating a frog whole

were getting our trek mountain bikes tomorrow when we go to our host families, which means I am definitly doing some journey of hope type rides through the country side

I am very pleased with how I packed. I feel like a have the perfect mix of clothes and electronics. by the way im using my roommates lap top right now and everything after this will be at internet cafes.

DO NOt send packages DHL because it will cost me a fortune to pick them up

Goodbye for now

Here I come Togo!

Right now I just got done my last orientation session in Philadelphia and we depart for Togo tomorrow morning. Orientation was great because it really cleared up a lot of issues and questions that we as future volunteers had. Our training class for the CHAP(community health and HIV prevention) program consists of 16 members. I knew from the people I met on the Internet prior to staging that the Peace Corps were looking for very qualified volunteers. I can say with great certainty that this training class is no different. We all come from a wide range of backgrounds and educations including several volunteers with their PHD's and a ton of other work experience. The one thing that was interesting to me was out of the 16 health volunteers I didn't hear one person mention that they were a Public Health major in college. Most come from backgrounds of communication, science, or other discipline( like nutrition) that is related to health in some way. Anyway I guess the bottom line is that the people I have met thus far are very dedicated and easy to get along with. It makes things a lot easier already since we have already gotten to know each other well as a group.

Tomorrow we are flying to Paris then waiting 6 or so hours then heading to Lome. We will be training about an hour north of Lome and the first 3 days of training we will be living with in a hostel before we get assigned host families. I am looking forward to meeting my host family. When I think of a host family I can't help but think back to when I first met Mohammad and Khalid and remembering the culture shock that they were being put through. I remember having to correct their English over and over again but in the end having them as friends was well worth the time. For me it will be the same deal except in French. The host families are trained by the Peace Corps so there is no worry that they will show frustration that easily.

Overall I am very excited to start my training in the Peace Corps. I started applying to join the Peace Corps in September and now tomorrow I will finally step foot in Africa.

From this point on I am not really sure how much time I will have with this blog. I know training for the next three months will be incredibly stressful. I cannot say with great certainty that I will be able to or want to update this especially if I am speaking in French all day, but I will definitely do what I can to give you some sort of perspective of how training is going. Before I go I want to thank all my friends and family for being supportive of my decision. I know it was a shock to most but it is a once ina lifetime experience to grow as a person both personally and professionally.

......and please make sure Obama takes the White House this fall, I do not want to explain to the togolese people the ideologies of McCain.

Goodbye United States

Wow, time has really moved fast here in the past two weeks. Between my sparse rosetta stone usage and the multiple family functions that I have been to recently I have not had a lot of alone time until now to even think about what I am getting myself into. It is now starting to finally sink in that I will not be back to the US for over a year. This should be a scary thought to many, however, I am not nervous about it even on the eve of my departure. How can this be? I feel like I have changed significantly over the past two years both personally and professionally. The challenges that the Peace Corps will present to me are not something that I am scared of. I look at it as the ultimate opportunity to learn more about people that are culturally much different than myself. This difference in culture is something that I am looking to embrace and I will do whatever it takes in order to be an asset to my work. I am of course going to miss so many people here in the United States but I will be back sometime next year when I finally decide to take one of my vacation breaks. I have several goals that I wish to accomplish in the Peace Corps, but for the first three months it is best that I just take in as much as I possibly can without putting to much stress on myself. I will be in Philadelphia until Friday engaging in multiple orientation sessions and vaccination field trips (yay). On friday we will depart for Paris and then from there we will fly to Lome. I have decided not to bring my computer. I think it will just be a distraction because there is little chance that my house will have electrictity and no chance that it will have wireless internet service. My cell phone broke so I am just going to wait until I get to Togo to buy a new one. The only electronics I am bringing are Ipods and alarm clocks. I know the next two years will be tough, but I enjoy adapting to difficult situations that I know will make me a better person in the long run.... and if I can cycle 80 miles a day across the USA, I have a good feeling I can make in Togo.

So much to do in so little time

Well I officially accepted my invitiation to join the Peace Corps leaving June 4th. The whole process of joining the Peace Corps was a slow and tiresome adventure that really tested my patience. It was an incredibly slow process until I got the phone call asking me if I could move up my departure date two months and live in a French Speaking community. At this point the process went from me having an entire summer to get ready to go, to holy crap I leave 2 weeks after my graduation. The change in time was something that caught me completely off guard, but the opportunity that awaits in Togo sounds amazing, and if I'm going to go then I might as well go as soon as possible. The French on the other hand is something I'm a little anxious about. Usually programs in French speaking African countries only accept applicants that have at least 2 years of high school French plus 2 semesters worth in college. My Peace Corps placement officer was confident that I could adjust to the situation so I accepted. I currently have 1 quarter of French in the 7th grade and nothing else since. So Honestly, I am a bit nervous to be so behind as far as my language goes, however, I have heard encouraging news from multiple Peace Corps volunteers who were in the same predicament as me who progressed just fine. I realize that I will have to put a lot more effort into my language skills than a lot of my other Peace Corps trainees, and I plan on spending most of my evening engaging in conversations with my host family and reading some basic French literature(basically I'm going to shut down my English for two years if possible). My progress in French is absolutely critical if I am going to be an asset to my program. The projects that I will be working on in Togo are going to require me to engage in quite a bit of public speaking. Presentations, demonstrations, and counseling are just some of the activities that I will be doing on a daily basis.

So you might be thinking there's no way that you will be fluent in French after your 3 months of training. This is true, It will take longer than the three months of training to become fluent, however, The Peace Corps is known for having exceptional language training classes. The French courses will be tailored to situations, events, and conversations that are relevant to what I will be dealing with in terms of my job and community setting.

Basically to sum up I'm more worried about the language adaption rather than the other cultural differences that I see when I am there. Yeah I'm probably going to have to use a hole in the ground as a bathroom and walk 400 meters to a stream for microbial infested water that I will have to boil for 20 minutes before I can use it to take a bath and wash my clothes. This stuff doesn't really bother me, but if I cant make progress in adapting to the language, it will make for a frustrating experience. I'm still confident though....A tout à l'heure

Togo in June!

I have just received my invitation to join the Peace Corps. The assignment is HIV/Health work in Togo, West Africa. Togo is a small French speaking country that borders Ghana, Benin, and Burkina Faso. I am really looking forward to this opportunity and judging by the pictures I have seen online Togo looks like an amazing place to be. I will be leaving the United States on June 4th, and will not return for 27th months. In the mean time I will be learning as much French as I can possibly handle. More to come soon.

Application status

My application is currently on hold because I need to have my wisdom teeth taken out. I am getting this done during Spring Break so hopefully I will get my invitation to a specific country sometime in late March or April. Hopefully there are no other complications in the application process. Kinda getting anxious here.

My Future

If you have found this site you probably already know that when I graduate in May from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro I will be going into the Peace Corps. This will be the site of my blogs for the next two years. I would not count on this being updated regularly for obvious reasons. The Peace Corps is a government program that will be shipping me over seas for 27 months. I have thought about joining the Peace Corps for roughly two years now and over the course of my time here in college I have realized that helping people who sincerely need it is one of the most rewarding aspects in life. Over the past few years my views have changed exponentially as to where exactly I want to go in my life. Though my original goal in college was to come out a Registered Dietician, I have come to realize that there is a greater opportunity for me to have an impact on peoples lives by working in the Peace Corps first.
On December 11th, I was nominated for public health education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since that time the Peace Corps have sent me quite a bit of paperwork (medical/dental forms) and I have now finally completed it all. Right now I am waiting on my invitation to serve which will tell me which country I will be in for the next 2 years.
For now all I can do is wait, My approximate departure date will be Aug/Sept. 08.

Frequently asked questions that I get all the time:

Are they going to send you to Darfur?
- no the Peace Corps do not have programs set up in countries where the workers will be in an unsafe environment ex. Sudan, Congo, Chad

How long will you be there?
27 months - 3 months of language and job related training followed by 2 years of service

Will you have access to internet?
Probably not, I have noticed that a lot of the blogs that Peace Corps workers have in Africa have sparse postings (monthly) and a lot of them stop after training because when they move to away from the training site they lose internet access.

Do you get paid anything to volunteer?
Volunteers are given money to provide necessities of living during the time that they are abroad. It will definitely be enough for me to eat and drink an adequate amount in a given day. At the end of the service I will be given $6,000 to acclimate myself back to the United States.

Why would you want to go to Africa?
first, I am ineligible to work in South/central America because all of the programs there require fluency of Spanish prior to departure. In Africa, it is unrealistic to think that many volunteers speak Swahili or some other indigenous language found in the southern countries.
second, Africa posses challenges that intrigue me. Most countries in Africa suffer incredibly high infant mortality and HIV rates. That being said, It should not be to difficult to address the needs of the community and take action. Don't get me wrong though change is not easy by any circumstances, but the possibility is there.
third, The area of health that I am most knowledgeable in is nutrition, and there are many preventable vitamin and nutrient deficiencies that parts of Africa suffer from and they can be cured.

Any chance you will be placed somewhere else?
There is a chance that I could end up in Asia or Eastern Europe, however, it is doubtful since I have been nominated for Africa.

What are the dangers of serving in Africa?
Water borne pathogens and parasites are the most common problems I have read about thus far. It is important to watch what you eat and drink. I have read a number of cases where volunteers are out for weeks at a time with intestinal problems.


Are you scared/nervous?
nope