Ellen and Steve have been invited to serve in the US Peace Corps in South Africa pending medical and legal clearance. We will “stage” on January 20th, 2016, probably in Philadelphia. From there we travel to Johannesburg and then to the training location. After 10 weeks of pre-service training (PST), we will be sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers. We will serve for 24 months as HIV Outreach Coordinators.
We will not find out our specific location until midway through the training, but it will likely be a small village or town in the northeastern provinces of South Africa.
When Ellen and I were first married in 1980, we went to the Federal Office Building in Minneapolis to see if we could join the Peace Corps. At the time they were more interested in people who already had hard skills under their belts, and took a pass on us.
More recently, we have been spending a great deal of time considering where we want to go with our lives. It seemed a good time to dust off the old Peace Corps idea as it combines our love of travel, learning new cultures, and service. We first applied in November of 2014. We were invited to serve in the Republic of South Africa in March, (shortly after visiting Monticello with Ellen’s Aunt Margie).
We are not going into this blindly. Our daughter Blakey served 3 years in Samoa where we visited her. It may seem counter-intuitive to willingly go into a situation that will likely be frequently uncomfortable and fraught with daily tragedies. I guess we believe that it will all be worth it in the end.
Besides, it will be like boot-camp for more travel afterwards.
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