20 days!

Well, after months and months of waiting, I found out about 3 weeks ago that I am going to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin!!! It's a small country in West Africa on the Atlantic Coast located between Togo and Nigeria. I leave for staging in Philadelphia on July 1st, where I'll meet with about 60 other Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) to get some basic info and vaccinations. Then on the 4th we'll all fly to Cotonou, Benin together.

For the first two months, we'll all be placed in homestays in the southern capital of Porto Novo and recieve time intensive training for language, culture, health and safety, and of course our jobs. In September we'll move to our official posts and I'll begin my two years as a secondary education English teacher!

The past few weeks since graduation I've been very busy at home in Chicago preparing to head to Africa. Although I'm leaving basically all of possessions behind, turns out I've had to spend lots of money buying new things to take with me. While it's exciting to get lots of new and interesting stuff and I definitely want to be prepared, it still feels weird to be spending so much money to move somewhere where I won't really have much at all, and my neighbors will probably have even less.

Packing has been made easier through facebook and other online communication with PCVs currently in Benin and West Africa. They say not to stress about it too much, and that most people overthink it, but I think focusing on packing and buying a bunch of random things is also a useful distraction from the things that will really be hard- like saying goodbye and how I'm going to have to change myself to fit into a new culture. Oh well...I'll deal with all of that in time, and figuring out how I'm going to fit 2 years into 80 pounds of luggage is enough to keep my mind occupied for now!

On an AMAZING note- while attending the MI-ACE Annual Conference in East Lansing this week, it was my job to shuttle two of our guest speakers back and forth from the airport. Turns out, one of them was a founding sponsor of an NGO in Benin that works to promote education and provide student scholarships!!! Her friend married a Beninese man and they started this foundation together. She called her friend for me, who was absolutely delighted to hear about me and can't wait to work together! She said their organization is already working with a PCV in Benin, and they'd be happy to help me out with whatever I might need!! I've got her contact information and I plan on calling her tomorrow to learn more about her organization and how we might be able to work together in the future. Basically, I think it's just a sign of the stars aligning and that I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing with my life :-). That's cheesy...but it's reassuring.