After ten weeks of training, the M78s are on the verge of becoming Peace Corps volunteers. On Wednesday August 15^th, we’ll have our big swear-in ceremony and then our new host families will whisk us off to our permanent sites. Work starts on Thursday! Yikes!

Although the journey so far has been intense, the real adventure has yet to begin. We’ve been living in the capital “city” of Kolonia (population 7,000), where everyone speaks English, grocery stores carry all the comforts of home, and Western influence is everywhere. Now most of us are heading off to rural villages with fewer amenities and stricter gender roles. Plus, we won’t have daily interaction with our fellow PCVs anymore.

By the way, here is a picture of my training host family:

(These are only the people that live in my house. We have a huge extended family that lives on our street.)

I’m very nervous to start teaching – I hope I’m up to the task! I’ll just be observing my co-teachers for the first few weeks, thankfully, and I’ll also have help from Molly. She’s a current volunteer at my school and we’ll have two months of overlap before she heads back to the states.

I’m also incredibly nervous about my Pohnpeian abilities. The language is grammatically simple (aside from those crazy pronouns) – past tense is usually the same as present tense and there’s no verb for “to be” (we just say “I hungry” or “she pretty”). But I have a very limited vocabulary, I struggle to put sentences together, and I can’t understand anything that people say! So it’s going to be an uphill battle. If only I had been placed in a Spanish-speaking country, sigh…

I’ll be coming into Kolonia for monthly meetings the last Friday of each month, so that’s when I’ll definitely have internet access. I’ll have to see if there are other opportunities, but regardless I’ll try to update this blog monthly!

Here goes!