Almost there...

So the first, exhausting day and a half of staging is over and I'm getting closer to departure for South Africa! So far so good, our group (SA20) is really diverse, interesting, and awesome! Lots of married couples, retired volunteers, recent grads like myself, and everyone in between. The PC is great and gives us walking around money for meals and small items that we need... it's great because it kind of feels like we are a bunch of kids on a big field trip! In a good way though..

Tomorrow we check out of our hotel, go together to a clinic to get some shots, then it's off to the airport. We arrive in Johannesburg Friday evening and are pretty much shuttled to our training site right away!

I may not have internet/phone access for these first couple months, but hang in there and I'll send updates as soon as I can!

À bientôt! (I'll let you know when I learn how to say that in Setswana..)

In Washington DC!

Hi everyone!

This will be my blog I'll post on throughout my time as a Peace Corps volunteer. Today Im in Washington DC en route to South Africa to be a School and Community English Resource Specialist. The basic elements of this position, taken from that assignment description I recieved from the Peace Corps, are as follows:

• Assist teachers in improving their teaching, content knowledge base, and classroom practices
• Provide direct instruction to learners
• Complement the Department of Education's training of teachers, school management teams, and principals on outcome-based curriculum
• Support initiatives to promote HIV/AIDS awareness and education in schools and communities
• Strengthen partnership between school governing bodies, teachers, parents, learners and community members
• Initiating, supporting, and strengthening programs in the community which empower out-of-school youth

Yep, a lot of very broad duties! I'm sure I'll find much more out about what really I'll be doing when I get there, this is just to give you an idea of the basics.

I just found out there will be about 46 of us in our group, and all of us will be stationed in either the Northern Cape or the Northwest province.. so you can kind of see where those are at on the map. Our first 2 months of training are at an old teacher training college at a place called Marapyane... not sure if you can really see it on a map but its pretty close to Pretoria.

Here's my basic timeline:

July 22-23: Staging (Pre-service orientation) in Washington DC... this is where I'll be able to meet everyone else!

Thursday July 23 5:40 pm: Flight leaves for SA! It's about 18 hours long, so we will actually arrive Friday evening (SA time)... which will be morning time here.

For about 1 week we will be staying in dorms at our training site called Marapyane.. it's in the Mpumalanga province near a town called Bela Bela (in Limpopo) if you can find it on a map. After that we get moved to our training host families!

September 17: We officially become volunteers and get placed in our permanent sites for the full 2 years.

I had such a great month before I left, filled with a trip to Seattle, camping trips, climbing 14ers, seeing friends and family, and of course preparing!

I miss you all already and I will update this every chance I get (however scarce this may be..), make sure to inform me on what's going on in your lives too!

My address during training is:
Kristin Mayer, PCT
Peace Corps
PO Box 9536
Pretoria 0001
South Africa

And to leave you all with a pretty picture.. here's our climb up Mt. Cameron and Mt. Lincoln - Ill miss Colorado!!