Launch!

Day 1 of the Peace Corps began at 3:45AM and my parents taking me to the airport to fly to Miami. It was another tough goodbye, but expected and encouraging in an odd way. I love my parents and their support has been, always, an irreplacable part of my life. No problems getting to Miami, meeting up with other volunteers, and then going through staging. I was very pleasantly suprised by how well the group of people melded and also how well Peace Corps ran the staging event. It was a good balance of serious information ("This is your job and your conduct reflects on the United States"), a lot of fun, pump up activities, as well as somber but inspiring reflections tasks.

The day ended with a giant college-freshmen-like herd of us all trying to find dinner. It turned out really well as groups naturally broke up into manageable sizes (some people insisted on IHOP, while me and 8 others insisted on a nice steak) and really, it was a very good day.
One of the interesting things is that you travel to your country on your own - no one from Peace Corps travels with you. They have the group come up with a 4 leaders and then the Peace Corps staff gives them some fairly idiot proof checklists to follow, but still - it's surprising that they just stand there and wave as you head towards the airport from the hotel. In a way, it's also surprising that it's surprising.

Being a group leader is nothing much - just makes it so someone is doing headcounts and taking responsibility for pointing the group in the right direction at a couple of basic checkpoints - but it got a little interesting in Curacao (our 5 hour layover on the way to Suriname. It's a country! I didn't know :-P). Turns out Suriname Airways had changed policies right around the time we bought our tickets and thus wanted to charge us for bags in an unanticipated way.
At this point it was hard not to feel like I was either on vacation or a normal business trip. I ended up in a discussion with the supervisor, then the manager, and eventually got the fee knocked down from $50 per 2nd bag to $30. Maybe. It wasn't really clear what "I" did but I know we ended up only paying $360 (in cash) instead over $600. Sometimes just standing and shuffling official looking papers/making friends with the Supervisor pays off.

After that, it was smooth sailing to Suriname. We got to our training site (just outside the capitol of Paramaribo) at about 2AM where almost all of the current volunteers greeted us with cheers, pangees (cotton cloth wraps that double as towels, sweat rags, shirts, and skirts), and bananas. It was a long day with a few bumps and a lot of sweat, but we made it. Tomorrow at 9am, training begins.