Sunday, March 29, 2009

About to run the rapids

It's 10pm and I'm finishing up last minute details, trying to get to bed so I can get up at 4:30 am to get to the airport.
Thinking today of how this is like running a big rapids--lots of scouting, figuring out the correct route to take, butterfly nerves, feeling like throwing up--but then you get in the canoe and start down the rapids, and you are just there, so focused, so in your body, and nothing else matters.
So that's where I'm at--about to go down the biggest rapids of my life, I think. And so ready to do it.
Thanks so much to all of you for your support and help and love. I hope to communicate as much as possible, though you might not hear from me as much in the beginning until I get settled with my host family and figure out what access to the internet I have.
Bye for now--see you in Ukraine.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Two days out

Hello dear friends,
So here it is, my first post to my blog. Peace Corps suggested (strongly) that we password protect our blogs since so many people in Ukraine are now on the internet. So you are receiving an email invite. Somewhere on the invite you can indicate that you want posting updates, then you will receive an email when I make a post. Which I will try to do often, but who knows??
Here's what I do know:
Monday March 30th at 7am I fly to Philadelphia where I meet up with the other volunteers going to Ukraine--there are about 50 of us. We have a 4 hour meeting in a hotel, stay overnight, then take a bus the next day to JFK where we fly to Kyiv (capital of Ukraine) via Franfurt. I think we will end up in Kyiv on Wednesday sometime. For the first two days we are all at a retreat center (in the woods outside of Kyiv), then we go in groups of 5 to the community where we will have our training for the next 11 weeks. We will each live with a host family and meet every day for language and other training, and will work on a community project on Saturdays. At the end of the 11 weeks if we pass the training, we will be assigned to our permament site somewhere in Ukraine.
So that's what I know and all I know!! What an adventure..... I will try to make posts as often as possible and send pics too. After talking and planning for this for more than a year, I am so looking forward to it really happening and seeing exactly what kind of adventure I have gotten myself into. I will learn a lot, that much I know.