One Month.

29 days.

4 weeks.

One motto.

Itineraries and reality

This morning, they arrived! The information about staging finally found its way into my inbox -- and with 2 emails, 3 attachments, and one phone call to the travel agency, things just got real. 

Things I now know:

- I will be leaving out of the Detroit metro airport at 7:00 AM on Monday, March 19th, and arriving in Philadelphia at 9:00 AM.

- I will be staying in Philadelphia for one night while we complete staging (very close to the Liberty Bell, I might add)

- I will be boarding a bus to the New York JFK international airport at  10:00 AM on Tuesday, March 20th.

- At 6:45 PM, it's wheels up - I will be on a nonstop flight to Casablanca, Morocco, beginning the adventure of a lifetime.

You might be asking yourself, "What the heck is this 'staging' business she keeps referencing? Why do they stop in Philadelphia for a day?"

Staging is a very brief, intense orientation that we take part in before leaving the country for Morocco. We'll receive our ticket for traveling from JFK to Casablanca, get to know one-another, and get some basic information needed before our full, three-month long Pre-Service Training (PST) in Morocco.

It's comforting to know that we will be taking this first step of our journey in the form of a mini-trip to a US city, meeting our fellow volunteers and making sure we've got all of the bureaucratic necessities taken care of. (Also, a note to future volunteers: don't worry, Peace Corps books and pays for your flight to staging and your accommodations while there! You are taken care of!)

The entire pre-service orientation and training process is extensive, which is both awesome and surprising to some people -- So many people (including myself, two years ago) have this idea in their heads that Peace Corps entails being dropped out of a plane into the middle of nowhere with only so much as a handbook and a "good luck," and that couldn't be farther from the truth! I'll talk more about this in a later post, but we'll have 3 months of intensive training and 2 different host families to introduce us to the culture before they let us loose!

The emails also contained a bunch of other specifics, including some instructions about training modules/classes that we need to complete online before arriving for staging - and I'd be lying if I said the student in me didn't get a little excited about that!

This is actually happening. There is actually a ticket purchased by the Peace Corps for my departure. This is not a hypothetical. This is happening. . . ! Excitement would be an understatement.

Hold on to your hats!

And so it begins

Yesterday, while walking to my car, I absentmindedly pulled out my phone to check my email. I expected Change.org petitions, blog updates, notes from my internship - the usual. Except this time, right at the top, in what seemed to me like huge red block letters, popping out of the screen and ringing bells and whistles (but surely were not doing anything of the kind) were the sender: EMA/Morocco and subject line: Peace Corps Morocco.

I'll be honest: Although my first thought was that it would be an email about staging, my only-a-micro-second-later second thought was that it was going to be a notice of our program being cancelled. The subject line was so simple, and as a result so cryptic, at least to the anxious brain.

If you have an iphone, you know that sometimes, though rarely and apparently only when it senses your anxiety about something, the mail application takes eons to load a single message. The cutesy circular version of the Microsoft hourglass spins and spins, taunting you with the information hidden behind it. I may or may not have stopped walking and gasped audibly when I saw the email. I also may or may not have then shaken the phone and yelled at bit at it when it wouldn't load the message.

FINALLY, after my phone had had its fun and several people were staring, I was able to read the email. It was from the Morocco Country Desk, giving us the first pieces of information about staging! Whew! The email said a lot, but it was basically some updates about our online Welcome Book, a request for resumes and aspiration statements from those who still hadn't sent them (mine are long since turned in!), and - this is the fun part - some questionnaires about training for us to fill out! 

- Language questionnaire: For our first two months of training, we will be spending a lot of time in intensive language classes, mostly learning Darija (Moroccan Arabic). In order to split us up effectively into our smaller language learning groups, they want to know some information about our past language learning experiences, what types of learners we are (visual, audio, etc), and any experience we might have with Arabic. 

- Homestay questionnaire: During training, we will also be living with a Moroccan host family! This questionnaire is meant to help our future host families get to know us a bit, and it looks fun - it asks about our background, hobbies, and preferences, and will be given to our host families (translated into Arabic) before we arrive! Awesome!

As Glinda said, "It's always best to start at the beginning!"

This is certainly the start of a beginning, the beginning of an adventure.

Hold onto your hats!