I’m now officially registered as a Peace Corps Trainee! And tomorrow, we will take a bus to JFK, fly out in the evening, have a layover in Brussels, and then arrive in Cameroon on Friday!

I’m also completely exhausted. I’ve been awake for about 30 hours now, after a nap yesterday. I tend to procrastinate… so I basically did the bulk of my packing this morning, around 4 AM. I would probably not recommend this to anyone. But it (mostly) worked for me! I basically spread out everything I wanted to bring on the floor of my bedroom, knowing that I was limited to 80 pounds for my two pieces of checked luggage, according to Peace Corps rules. I shoved it all into my Osprey internal frame backpack and my duffel bag (and some onto my normal backpack carry-on). Somehow, when I got to Reagan Washington airport, my two checked bags only came out to be about 65 pounds total! Score.

I got to Philly this morning around 10:30, and we made it to the hotel around noon, after 1) figuring out this shuttle for the hotel, which was really not a shuttle and 2) waiting awhile for the said shuttle. We then had to wait in line for Peace Corps staff to process our registration forms. While we waited, we sat on the floor and played cards. I got good vibes from people already.

So, then, the actual “Staging,” as they call it. It was five hours of discussions about expectations, challenges, anxieties, etc, and some logistics thrown in. There are lots of cool Peace Corps Trainees, so I’m really excited to get to know them. After just a few hours in, I had felt like I had met them months ago. Or perhaps that was the fatigue kicking in and messing up my perception…

Afterward, I got to hang out with the lovely Wende Marshall, who was my favorite professor at UVA and recently moved to Philly. Wende taught me a lot about how to perceive the world, as an anthropologist and as a compassionate human being, and I hope to take some of her lessons with me. Anyway, we kinda got lost in Philly while searching for a place to buy a few items that I didn’t think to bring, which were a pillow (!!!) and a non-stick frying pan (I think that I had read about it being recommended on a blog, and I had completely forgotten.)

I’m rather tired, so I’m going to end this entry with a story that I found while cleaning my room. I wrote for school when I was eight years old. Interpret it as you will.

Dated March 14, 1996: “One day I found an octopus in my bathtub. It was a white octopus. He wanted to go to school, but I said no. so I played school with him. I was the teacher. He got an Outstanding on everything. So I gave him a treat everyday. Soon I ran out of candy. So he yelled, cried and whined. He went back home.”