Packed!

With a lot of help from Mom and Dad, I am now pretty much packed up and ready to go.

Pictured above are my bags. I'm pretty sure I'm well under the Peace Corps limits but I can't at this point think of anything else I really need at least for the three months of training. It's kind of exciting to have your life mostly fit on your back.

I've also got a pretty good grasp on the 5 Setswana language lessons by now. I can say hello, introduce myself, and say my house is being robbed! and good bye. By tomorrow afternoon I should be done with all the paperwork and last obligations here in the states. Hard to believe, but it's all about to begin.

Preparing for Departure

Dumelang borra le bomma! (Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen!)

I've spent the last few weeks at home preparing for my departure for South Africa by making my packing list, reading, and practicing some basic Setswana (the language of my training region). I leave South Dakota on Monday to go to Philadelphia for a few days of staging. From there, I'll fly out with roughly 90 other trainees to Johannesburg via Frankfurt, Germany on the 19th. We then drive out to a small university about 2.5 hours northwest of Johannesburg where we begin our pre-service training (PST). PST will last until roughly September 20, when we go to our sites. During PST, I will have limited access to phones and the internet but after I get to site, I will probably get a cell phone and have some bit of access to internet on a semi-regular basis. From then on, I'll try to update this blog with pictures and stories, so don't get discouraged if this is the last update for the next 3 months.