We Are Volunteers!

Today, September 17, 2009, we took the oath to become Peace Corps Volunteers.

Yesterday we traveled on a chartered bus from our training site to the casino/hotel where we were sworn in. We were sad to say goodbye to our host mother and her comfortable home. We met at the college with all our luggage. The bus was so full that the back several row of seats were stuffed with luggage and the Peace Corps also had a truck and trailer full of stuff we had bought earlier this week on our Shopping Day excursion to Pretoria.

It was a long ride. We were supposed to have arrived around 2 p.m. and it was a little after 4 when we finally arrived. The training manager, who was driving the truck, was calling David in the bus and texting him with messages updating us on what to do about our luggage. David, in turn, was relating the updates to the whole bus. It got kind of funny, especially when David announced he was impersonating the training manager.

We arrived at a lovely hotel casino with nice rooms and bathrooms.

We hauled all our stuff to our rooms and then had a session with Country Director McGrath. It covered stuff we had already discussed such as blogging and travel and leave and last minute details.

(You may have noticed the disclaimer in the upper right-hand corner of this page. The Peace Corps insists that whatever active volunteers write has to avoid controversy and respect the security of other volunteers. That's the reason we don't but place names or very many personal names in this blog. If you're really dying of curiosity about where we are, email us. We can tell you in private, just not in public.)

We had a delicious buffet dinner outside near the pool. We sat around for a long time talking with fellow trainees and then went to bed.

This morning we awoke and had a nice breakfast. Then we had to move our entire luggage out of the rooms into the same room where we had the ceremony. I was glad we had not bought a refrigerator or a big stove.

We had had our clothes pressed by the hotel housekeeper and we looked quite nice when we were dressed for the ceremony.

At a little before 11 a.m. the new U.S. ambassador-designate to South Africa, Donald Gips, arrived and we had a group picture taken with him. The school principals we will be working with were in the audience. Then the ceremony began. The first two South African speakers were from the Department of Education and both gave thoughtful speeches and expressed their appreciation for the Peace Corps. Then the Country Director spoke and administered the oath. It was quite moving. We all stood and raised our right hand and promised almost the same thing the president and other officials promise when they take the oath.

After the oath our language training staff came up and sang two African songs for us. Finally, the ambassador-designate gave a short speech encouraging us and promising to support us. (We are his first group. He has only been in South Africa for three weeks – not even time enough to present his papers for acceptance by the South African government and move from being ambassador-designate to ambassador.)

Afterward we had a buffet lunch. Our supervisor had arranged for a kombie to pick us up and bring us back to our permanent site. We are staying with the chief of the village and his wife for another week until we can move into a place near the Catholic school where we will be working.

It was sad leaving the hotel because we were parting from all the trainees we had become so close to in the past very intensive eight weeks. The next chance we'll have to see most of them will be in January, when we have an in-service training conference. Nonetheless, we're glad pre-service training is over. If we survived that two months, surely two years at our site will be easy by comparison.