On Our Way to Africa

Hello family & friends (and random people who happen to find our blog),

Yesterday we met our Botswana Peace Corps group at our staging in D.C. Our group is 60 strong and out of the 60 there are 9 married couples. There will probably be only 8 remaining at the end of our training ;) Chris and I are fine...no worries. The group seems like an excellent bunch of people from all sorts of backgrounds.

We are leaving Washington D.C. tonight and will be flying non-stop to Johannesburg, South Africa. The flight is a little over 15 hours. We will be staying in Johannesburg for a few days and then we will go on a 6 hour bus ride to our training site in Botswana. The city we will be in is Molepolole. Once we're at the training site we will have an intense 8 week training program covering language, culture and security topics. We're excited for the training, but we were told it will be like final exam day everyday. Good thing Chris and I are excellent students ;)

During the training we will be staying together with a host family. We will be assigned a host family once we get to the training site. After the training all the volunteers will be sent to different communities and we will live separate from other volunteers, but together in a hut, house, apartment, or whatever we can find within our community. There is a lot of unknown with the Peace Corps, but they do that on purpose so they can assess our personalities before we go off to our communities and work on our assignments.

For some of you that don't know I will explain our assignments. They are pretty general right now and they could change. Chris will be working as a Community Health HIV/AIDS Capacity Builder. Which means he will be either working with home base and orphan care for those affected (in one way or another) by the virus or he will work on educating mothers to prevent transmission of the virus to the children. My (Shelly's) assignment is NGO (non governmental organization) HIV/AIDS Capacity Builder. Which means I will be working with community or government programs that create awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. That is about all we know so far.

Communication

Phone - We're not exactly sure what kind of access we will get once we're in Africa. Our plan is to buy a cellphone, but if you want to talk to us you will have to call us using a calling card because making international calls would be way too expensive for someone on a Peace Corps volunteer salary. Not sure when the best time to call would be, but we will let you know. A current volunteer gave this link - http://www.speedypin.com - of a good place to purchase calling cards, to her family and friends.

Internet - For those of you who have Skype (a free computer program that allows free international audio and video calling for everyone with a Skype account) my name is seriouslyshelly. If you want to talk to us via Skype (if we have access to fast enough internet) just set up a time and date with me either by calling, emailing or by posting on my facebook wall.

Mail - If you would like to send us something we have two separate mailing addresses. The first is for letters and regular mail. The second is for packages. The addresses may change once we get to our communities. When sending packages a current volunteer recommended using a flat right box and stuff as much as you can into those to get the best deal. Many of you have asked what we need and don't worry we will let you know once we get there :) Thank you for your offers.

If you're interested in finding out more about Botswana below are a few links:

The World Factbook - Botswana: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/bc.html

The Lonely Planet: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/botswana

The Botswana Gazette (National Newspaper): http://www.gazettebw.com/


Time difference in Botswana versus U.S. Central Time - We're 7 hours ahead in Botswana.

We plan to update our post once a month (depending on our internet access). We will send out an email to our contacts every time we post an entry.

Now off to Johannesburg for some more shots! We took our Malaria pills last night. Luckily we had no side affects (as far as we can tell) like some current volunteers that we have spoken to who had terrible nightmares. I have a headache, but I always have those.

Feel free to comment on our blog. Thank you everyone for your support and we will see you back home in 2011!

Love,
Chris & Shel