You say goodbye, but I say hello

After months of waiting and weeks of goodbyes, this adventure has finally begun. We’ve been told numerous times by Peace Corps in the months leading up to this that our patience would often be tested. My patience was immediately tested before I got to training in Philadelphia. Scheduled for a 9 AM flight from San Francisco to Philadelphia, we finally took off at 12:45 PM.

I spent Friday night to Sunday morning with my grandparents and some family on my mother’s side. Some of the family, I haven’t seen for a good while, so it was good to see them again. But as with every meeting with someone, there had to be a goodbye…or goodbyes. I’ve never really like goodbyes, and after one goodbye after another, I’m sure that I don’t like goodbyes. It gets to a point where the emotion on my side just doesn’t exist.

But for every goodbye I’ve had over the last couple weeks, I think I have made up for it in hellos over the last couple days. There are 58 of us heading to Mozambique this week and all of us are running through the gamut of emotions. Everybody is pretty young – the youngest volunteer is 21 and the oldest is 29. It’s wonderful to be around young people who have similar desires, similar values, and similar views of the world in which we live.

The last couple of days here in Philadelphia have been a lot of getting-to-know-you games and learning about some Peace Corps basics – simple rules and safety. We took our first malaria pill, which means I should be having some awesome lucid dreams at some point this week. In the meantime, I’ll continue trying to learn put to names to faces. There should be plenty of time to get to know anyone on the flight.

Goodbye America. Hello Mozambique. Hello Peace Corps.