Peace − 16 June, 1999
I left for Peace Corps staging today. Arrived in DC with a huge rucksack and another bag and met my fellow trainees; a motley crew.
We got vaccinations, signed a lot of forms, went out to dinner together on M St. A few people dashed out to get duct tape, that last missing tool amongst their formidable array of supplies.
We were so clean, so white and fat. The pictures from this period show a bunch of folks who look happy, excited, and somewhat uncertain. But in a good way.
I couldn't get the "Indiana Jones" theme out of my head, especially as the plane took off for Brussels (we flew Sabena), the first stop on our way to Burkina Faso.
We got vaccinations, signed a lot of forms, went out to dinner together on M St. A few people dashed out to get duct tape, that last missing tool amongst their formidable array of supplies.
We were so clean, so white and fat. The pictures from this period show a bunch of folks who look happy, excited, and somewhat uncertain. But in a good way.
I couldn't get the "Indiana Jones" theme out of my head, especially as the plane took off for Brussels (we flew Sabena), the first stop on our way to Burkina Faso.
Comments:
kga245 (September 13, 2006. 03:14pm)
saw your post on Multiply and came here to have a look.Glad to have you join. If there's anything I can do to make this place more enticing to you, just let me know.
Peace,
K
htmljenn (September 20, 2006. 12:09am)
I have vivid memories of both the three days in DC (we had our initial training there) and the shots (I never need to do gamma globulin ever again, thank you very much...)
jcolman (September 20, 2006. 08:21am)
Yeah, the GG wasn't any fun. It was either that or one of the rabies shots that made my arm feel weak and bruised, like someone was constantly parking a Humvee on it.<br><br>I think that my group of trainees encountered another group of PCTs on their way to <a href="http://dandelife.com/story/6824">Uzbekistan</a> while we were laid over in Brussels. They looked just like us: clean, white, fat, and excited. But to show you what illiterate Americans we were, in retelling the tale of how we met them, we found out that we didn't even know where Uzbekistan was, and so constantly referred to it as being located "somewhere in the -Stan Belt."
htmljenn (September 20, 2006. 06:48pm)
*laugh* I got really good at describing it as "North of Afghanistan, south of Russian, west of China, and east of the Caspian Sea." Most people could at least sorta place it in their mind maps with that description.
Man, I'd forgotten the rabies shots... no those sucked too - and the day we had 4 shots all at once, both upper arms, one lower arm, and GG (in the butt). We were all walking wounded the next day.