Our Peace Corps Story Part 2

So I know that I kind of left you hanging with my first post about our Peace Corps story. We had just found out that we were nominated to go to Asia. We were nominated to teach English on my part, and Hal was nominated for Water and Sanitaion. The countries that the Peace Corps goes to in it's Asian region are Thailand, Cambodia, China, Phillippines, and Indonesia.

The next step in the process is medical. We had to visit our family practice doctor, get some shots, and since I didn't really have any record of what shots I had already recieved, we were super lucky that our insurance was willing to pay for a Titers test, which tells you what you're immune to for vaccinations, so thankfully I was able to avoid getting ones I had already had. That's actually where this post about shots came from.

We also had to go to the dentist and have them fill out a ton of paperwork. They had to do this awful test where they had to poke each tooth's gum line in three places with this awful painful pokey tool. It's to test if you have receeding gums. I had to have my obgyn fill out a ton of paperwork also. It takes a while for them to complete the medical review, so you have to get it done as soon as possible. We were able to be medically and legally cleared in December. After this we waited for a really long time to hear anything.

We were finally asked to update our resumes and our file moved on to our placement officer. We didn't hear anything for a long time after that. When we finally heard we thought it was real bad. Hal got an e-mail about his construction experience. For his job he tests construction, he doesn't actually construct things. But this was his experience in lieu of a Bachelors Degree. Our placement officer said that even though in Water & Sanitation you don't often actually build anything, you have to have actual construction experience. Hal was really bummed and thought it was because of him we weren't going to go. I reminded him he has a ton of non-commercial construction experience, so we filled out an addendum form and we turned it in. At this point we were really down. We just wanted someone to take a chance on us, and not be super bureaucratic.

This was around the time of the Congress budget crisis. We had our final interview with our Placement Officer and he seemed really nice after we actually got to talk to him. He said that he could clear us for service. YAHOO! but, because of the budget crisis OH NO! he can't offer us an invitation, and had no idea when they would start inviting people again. Oh boo.

We were really bummed about this. We started making plans to perhaps go next year, or maybe not go at all. We decided to not really do anything until we got back from our vacation in California. Then we would start looking at new apartments, new jobs, and perhaps going back to school.

While in California we got an e-mail saying that our Peace Corps status was updated. We got an invitation!! But we were in California. We called our placement officer and he said we would have to wait for our package to come in the mail. So we waited. We came back from California and waited some more. We were dying to hear.

The Thursday after we got home from vacation we recieved our package. We ate dinner together and then sat down and opened it together. We both just looked at each other and said CAMBODIA! JULY!?