Pre-Service Training

The flight to South Africa was the longest we had ever taken. We were in the airplane about 18 hours. The flight was an hour late due to bad weather. We flew to Dakar, Senegal in 7.5 hours, stayed in the airport about an hour and then flew another eight hours to Johannesburg, South Africa: 15.5 hours total.

After we left the airport we traveled by bus for another couple of hours to the site where we'll have Pre-Service Training before our service begins -- eight weeks of introduction to South African culture, language, and the educational system we'll be working in. It is a former teacher’s college that has been closed since 1994. Some of the buildings are used by the provincial Department of Education, and some by the Peace Corps.

A good dinner was awaiting us and then we were assigned to our rooms. We are in the married couples dorm -- there are five other married couples in our group of 43 volunteers, of them much younger than us. (We do have some more senior single women in the group.)

The weather has been unusually cold and we crawled into our beds and covered ourselves with the heavy, warm blankets they had provided.

On Day 1 we awoke at 5:45 to a very cold morning and no hot water. We were not brave enough for a cold shower. We wore our warmest clothes. There is no central heat in the buildings (there is apparently no central heating anywhere in South Africa) and it was SO cold. The dining room was not too bad, but the classroom was very cold and we sat with coats and gloves on. By afternoon it had warmed up enough so that we did not need heavy coats, but as soon as the sun went down it was very cold again.

The activities of the day were lessons in Afrikaans and Setswana and introductions to the Peace Corps Country Director and the training staff.

The medical officer came and talked about keeping healthy and we also got shots for MMR and typhoid. We were both very tired and had a slight reaction to the shots. We came back to our dorm in the afternoon and took a two-hour nap and felt much better. Then we had dinner and crawled under our covers and slept. We both feel better today.

Already we have lost three people who started with our group in Washington. A young couple dropped out the day we were flying to South Africa, and a man dropped out on Day 1 of training. So far we are still here.