S/P Application Day: 417, T-0 Days to Departure.
It's been exactly 200 days since I last posted on this blog, and the past 7 months have been nothing if not chaotic and character building. Building our Tiny House has helped Sam and I grow as individuals, grow as a couple, and has really helped me step back from the medical profession and gain some conception of myself outside of that role which as been so important and central to my identity for the past half-decade. (If you're at all interested in what that was like,, read about it at Molly & Sam's Tiny Adventure) I hope to be able to write about this in depth some time in the future, but right now I'm pretty badly jet-lagged, so instead of engaging in intensive introspection, I'll just summarize the last 96 hours or so.
Our Peace Corps Journey really began 4 days ago when we finished the Tiny House, packed our things, drove to New Jersey to say goodbye to my grandmother, unpacked and repacked all our things, and drove to Peace Corps Staging in Philadelphia. During this time, I think we slept a grand total of 4 or 5 hours. Finishing the Tiny House turned into such a rush job, that the night before we left home for the last time in 27 month, had hadn't packed a thing. We pulled 2 consecutive all-nighters to get everything into the proper weight/size configurations in our bags.
After a day of team-building activities at Staging, we spend one night in a hotel outside of Philadelphia (quite close to Bryn Mawr, actually) before setting off on our trip. I don't know that I've ever been so tired as I was that night- we slept very well. The next day, all the volunteers and our bags piled into buses and set off from Philadelphia to New York, we we would fly out of JFK. Why not fly out of Philadelphia? Why not stay in a hotel outside of New York? I don't know. I suspect that this is more of the same logic that had Sam and I fill out a 50+ page long application rather than submitting simple resumes and statements of interest.
We got to drive through New York to get to JFK, which was a nice way to say goodbye to America for a few years...
And I was able to accomplish my first Peace Corps life-hack when my cheap carry-on duffle broke halfway through security. What can serve to replace the broken carabiner and double as an awesome little gift for your host family? An I <3 NY key chain, of course.
At some point in time during the flight, we took the obligatory Airplane Selfie.... And then suddenly we're over Armenia:
This is my first glimpse of the country we'll be living in for the next two years. I have to admit that I find the sight a little intimidating- those mountains look intense. They're telling us to put away our electronics, so I'll have to wrap this up. Hopefully I will have more time to write once we're semi-settled in country.
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