July 22, 2014; S/P Application Day 24:
This morning Sam and I had a really great interview with our recruiter at a local coffee shop. Our recruiter (whom Sam and I had met on a few occasions before at info sessions etc) was super nice, and just like the PC website says, it was more like a conversation than a traditional job interview.
After a brief greeting and overview of the process, Sam and I were both interviewed individually, during which time we were asked a list of pre-determined questions (pretty much all of which can be found on the Peace Corps Wiki, although we weren't asked the playground one. That one's weird.) It took about an hour for each of us to get through.
Once we finished our individual questions, we were both asked to answer some questions together as a couple. I was warned by a RPCV who served as part of a married couple that they would ask really intimate questions, and would want to know "everything short of what's your favorite position". But this wasn't really our experience. More or less, we were asked to go through the discussion points that we were prompted to discuss before writing our couples essay questions in the application.
I'm not sure if they're still part of the written application or not. In case they aren't, I'm gong to include them below because I think that they're really important conversations to have with your partner before you apply to the Peace Corps together. While we were writing our applications, Sam and I took our time with these discussions, choosing nights when we had the energy to devote to serious thought, and not trying to rush through too many at once (this was entirely due to Sam's patience and insistence that we take our time, and it was the right thing to do. I was too impatient, I wanted to rush through them all at once).
• As a couple, what do you consider as some of the advantages and disadvantages of serving in the Peace Corps at this time?
• How specifically does each of you deal with stress? How does your spouse or domestic partner’s reaction to stress affect your relationship?
• What support systems do you currently use when you face difficult situations? Whom will you rely upon during your Peace Corps service for support in addition to your spouse/domestic partner? What coping mechanisms do you plan to employ to effectively deal with difficult circumstances?
• Identify a challenging situation or event that you have experienced as a couple. How specifically did you handle that particular situation? What did you learn from that experience?
• If a Volunteer becomes pregnant she might be medically separated from Peace Corps service and sent home. How does this policy affect your current commitment to serve 27 months in the Peace Corps?
• Undoubtedly, at various stages of Peace Corps service one of you is going to feel more successful than the other - in learning the language, initiating projects, assimilating into your community, etc. How have you dealt with differing levels of success in the past? How have you supported each other when one of you is doing well and the other is achieving success at a slower pace?
• While each spouse/domestic partner in a couple has his or her own duties as a Volunteer, many Volunteers have found that couples are often treated as a single unit in their communities, and may be expected to answer for their spouses/domestic partners in terms of work and social commitments when their spouses/domestic partners are unavailable. While such expectations and treatment may be completely normal according to the local culture, some Volunteer couples have found such experiences to be very frustrating at times. Please consider how you may cope with such situations as a Volunteer, and as a part of a couple.
When we had answered our Couples Questions, we were given a chance to ask any questions we had for our recruiter. Our questions mostly centered around our timeline, and thrilled to learn that our recruiter felt that a departure next spring to early summer was probable. She concluded the meeting by looking through the openings she had for married couples and giving us 4 countries to which she could nominate us. She told us to go home and do a little research, and send an email back to her to let her know to which program we would like to be nominated. This was awesome for two reasons: 1) Hey- we're being nominated! Awesome! and 2) we get to pick to which country we'd like to be nominated- now, that's no guarantee that we'll end up actually going there, but it can't hurt, right? The countries we were given to consider were Zambia, Guyana, Moldova and the Kyrgyz Republic, assignments to all of which leave in the spring or early summer of 2015.
Needless to say, I'm in going research crazy right now.
