For any Peace Corps program, the group of invitees will gather in a city within the USA for a “staging” day. The purpose of this day appears to serve two goals: one is to gather everyone ahead of time so that we can all travel to our country of service together and the other is to introduce both our group and the Peace Corps.
Our staging was held in Philadelphia, PA on September 10. We booked tickets using the Peace Corps travel agency about a month prior and arranged flights that would take us to Philadelphia the morning of September 11. In hindsight, I definitely would have liked to arrive in Philadelphia the night before to get a good night’s sleep. With our travel plans, we had 3 days with only a couple hours’ sleep each night and wound up exhausted by the time we arrived in Morocco. We checked into our hotel in Philadelphia and put our things down, then went out to find some lunch. There was a Middle Eastern fast food restaurant a block away, so we ordered shawarma pitas/bowls to take back to the room with us.
Our goodbye at our home airport at about 4:45am! We look tired and would remain so for the next few days!
After a quick change of clothes, we signed in and became official Peace Corps Trainees! The first activity was a group introduction; we each gave our name, home city/state, and the most interesting item that we packed (for those curious, mine was taco seasoning and Jon’s was his cross-stitch). We split into three smaller groups and started learning about the Peace Corps’ mission, goals, and core expectations along with discussions and activities on taking care of ourselves and overcoming culture shock. The training was fairly generic and didn’t touch too much on Morocco, so got a bit boring at times (at least for me).
Each small group was given a scenario that we may encounter and asked to present potential solutions.
Our group of trainees number 114; it’s one of the largest programs that the Peace Corps has. Out of our group, there are four couples (including me and Jon) and a handful of ‘older’ volunteers (in this context, ‘older’ refers to anyone over 30 or 35!). Most of the group appears to be comprised of recent college graduates who either just finished school or have only a few years’ work experience. While we haven’t met the entire group yet (we have been together six days so far and still haven’t met everyone!), all the trainees we have talked to have been very nice, open, and welcoming.
The training went for six hours, after which we had two and a half hours to shower, change, eat, and pack our bags. Jon went back to the same shawarma restaurant for dinner while I called home (happy birthday mom!) and took a brief catnap. Our bags were bursting when we took them down to the conference room, but we managed to lug it all with us. I’ll talk more about the travel in the next post, so stay tuned!
We started our training with a quiz to see how much we already knew about the Peace Corps!