And We're Off!

Along with my fellow 60 future Peace Corps Azerbaijan volunteers, I spent the past two days in Philadelphia doing general Peace Corps orientation and preparing for our next three months of training in Azerbaijan. It seems like a great group of people of all ages and from a variety of walks of life coming together for the common mission of development in Azerbaijan! Approximately 15 of us are Community Economic Development volunteers, there is a group specifically focusing on Youth Development projects and, of course, a large number will be teaching English. It has been such a relief to finally meet some of the people I will be working alongside, and I can already tell we are going to establish some amazing friendships over the next 27 months!

As I have visited with many of you over the past few months as I have prepared for this adventure, I have been unable to specify exactly what I might be doing in Azerbaijan and what my life there may be like. Unfortunately, I am still unable to answer many of those questions, but I can share with you what I know to expect of the next 3 months:

Tomorrow we will ride a bus to JFK Airport, from where we will depart for Frankfurt, Germany and unltimately Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan). After approximately 2 days of travel (fun!), we will arrive in Baku Tuesday evening and remain in Baku for Orientation Week at a local hotel. On Saturday, we will be taken to the communities where we will live during training and meet our host families. All 61 volunteers will be training in communities near the city of Sumgayit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumqayit) north of Baku, and we will be broken into "pods" of 5-6 volunteers per community. For 11 weeks, we will train in the language, culture and various aspects of our positions and are encouraged to spend a lot of time with our host families to better understand the culture and practice the language. On December 10th, we will graduate from training and be sworn in as official Peace Corps Volunteers. At that point, we will be taken to our posts around the country and begin 2 years of service.

I know there are still a lot of unknowns, but that is as much as I know at the moment. I want to thank you again for your encouragement and support. I am very excited about this adventure and cannot wait to dig in and see what happens! At least for the next week, I will not have internet or phone access, but I promise to blog about my first experiences in-country as soon as I am able.

Finally, two great quotes about tackling scary circumstances:

"I have been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do." -- Georgia O'Keefe

"The ultimate measure of a person is not where they stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where they stand at times of challenge and controversy." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.