Traveling to Peace Corps Staging

Ev at the airport, bright and early.

At home: The day started off predictably enough. My alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. and I groggily turned over and shut it off. Then, even though I was really excited to finally be leaving, I shut my eyes for a few more minutes and listened to the wind howling outside. The thought crossed my mind: What are the chances my 6 a.m. flight will be delayed because of the wind? There had been 60 mph gusts predicted.

I got up and dressed and tried to get online quickly to look up the airport number, but the Internet wasn’t working. I picked up the phone to dial and there was no dial tone. Interesting. Nevertheless I finished getting ready, my mom and dad stumbled down the stairs and made the call on a cell phone, and we were assured that yes, the plane was on time.

At the airport: An hour and a half after we were supposed to leave, we finally did. Apparently the power in that part of town was out, which meant their weather station wasn’t working, and they couldn’t get clearance to leave w/o an accurate weather forecast. So I sat in the tiny waiting room with all the other tense people and read my book, wishing I could have slept in my own bed for that extra 1.5 hours.

In Philadelphia: Staging went well. There are 41 people in our group with a pretty even split between males and females. A good number of the volunteers are over 50, which is a little unusual. We turned in paperwork, signed our special government passports, and received debit cards loaded with “walking around money” for the next three days. Then we received information on what to expect coming up, and had brief introductions to cultural issues and Peace Corps policies. There were a lot of participatory activities, including making up skits, and drawing pictures of our aspirations and anxieties. (Sorry, no pictures of our beautiful artwork. But ask your kids to draw “isolation” or “becoming fluent in Armenian” with markers and you’ll have a pretty good idea what our posters looked like.)

A group of seven of us went for a walk to find dinner at Jim’s Steaks, supposedly a really good stop for authentic Philly Cheesesteak. The walk kept going, and going, and going, especially for those of us who had woken early that morning and were already tired and hungry before leaving the hotel. But downtown Philadelphia is amazing, with artsy stuff to see everywhere. So I held up the group a little bit, taking pictures of some amazing things.