Staging

Welp, it happened—I’ve been orientated to the Peace Corps(!)

This afternoon, the 23 people in my group gathered in a small, frigid conference room in the Crown Royale Plaza hotel in Miami for five or so hours to become official Peace Corps Trainees (or PCTs, since turns out the Peace Corps is as acronym happy as one would expect of a governmental agency).

It was pretty much what you'd expect an orientation to be—beginning with a casual ice breaker, introductions, and then a review of the Peace Corps tenants, mission, our own aspirations and anxieties, policies, and our schedule for tomorrow. We had group breakout discussions, wrote on oversized pieces of paper, and even performed a skit! (Which was met with comforting skepticism from just about everyone in the room.) My personal favorite accoutrement, since it made me feel right at home, was our boldly named “Parking Lot,” poster (which, for any non-Epic/corporate readers, is the place where you put questions not currently applicable to the discussion to be answered later. Woohoo!)

Group mingling was exciting, since we have everyone from a 60-some year old ex-teacher to a radio personality. Teachers abound, with only 3 out of the 23 in the group coming straight out of college. After congratulating myself on preparing my “extremely” professional appearance (I wore a dress! Gasp!) I was startled to be surrounded by more than a few girls in pencil skirts and heels. Speaking of girls, I believe there are 18 girls to 5 guys…shocker!

With plenty of characters filling out the ranks, the general-mass divisors were language skills and belongings. On the luggage front, it was all about size; the light-luggage carriers were revered by most, though viewed by suspicion by the newly formed overweight-luggage- toters-clique. Weighing in at a cool 70 pounds (10 pounds under our limit) I stood firmly on average ground.

In terms of Spanish abilities, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself with plenty of non-bilingual friends. A few people know almost no Spanish, some classified themselves as having “survival” skills, and others were Spanish majors. Since from what I know the Peace Corps uses the Rassias Method, which I was exposed to in college and is a method which includes hours of language “drill” and often puts you on the spot (and therefore for me was more a lesson in shame than in French, my unfortunate undergrad language choice), I’m glad to know that I won’t necessarily be the lowest in my class!

That being said, it was unsurprising but still disconcerting to feel as though I may be at the lower end of the total-package skillsets—after my co-trainees asked “Do you speak Spanish?” to which my response is a solid “No,” the inevitable follow-up to this was, “So what’s your teaching background?” to which I also don’t have a great response. Every other person without Spanish skills had taught in classrooms anywhere from 1-30 years. So, although we are supposed to learn Spanish and teaching methods throughout the next 10 weeks prior to our placement, I’m hoping it won’t be too much of a struggle to keep up. Either way, one of the amazing things about the fact that our group has so much experience is that so many people in this group have had what we’re doing now as a lifelong goal.

We finished out the day with a group dinner at a seafood restaurant a block away and came back to our hotel rooms to prepare for our 4am wake-up. It is a sore point with most of us that for some reason, we must allow legitimately 5 hours to get from our hotel (literally a mile from the airport) onto our flight…but oh well…can’t really care, since the next time I post it will be from Colombia!