And Into the Peace Corps I Go!

And so it has begun. Here is a quick and dirty break down of what I’ve down from leaving home until my arrival last night in Albania.

On Wednesday night, fly from Sacramento to LAX to Philly to arrive at the hotel at 7am, first Peace Corps staging sessions started an hour later. There was a lot of ass time over two days, but we did a lot of ice-breakers and got to understand what the core expectations and goals of the Corps are. We also got to meet Kerri, the director of the Peace Corps who came because we will be the first group who will implement Let Girls Learn - a US program that is not just involved with the Peace Corps.

Love Park in Philly, PA

Liberty Bell and Peace Corp Albania Volunteers, Group 18

On Saturday morning we boarded a bus bound for JFK in New York City at 10:30am for a flight that would take off at 7pm for Vienna. We arrived there the next morning for a 12:45 departure to Tirana, Albania. We touched down and boarded some buses headed for Elbasan, and arrived at our hotel at 5pm; dinner was a 6pm.

There are a lot of time shifts in that description, which now leads to a 8 hour difference between where I will be living for the next 27 months and the west coast of the United States. The temperature is mild here and the mountains are towering. I’ll include some pics if the Internet comes back on.

Elbasani, Albania

I can’t say that I’ve had the best experience so far. This is not to say I’m unhappy, but the way that you’re sometimes treated does not represent how, a group that includes a high level of experience and education, should be treated. There is an expression that “we” trust you and then they tell us to be somewhere at 8:25 so that we’re there in time as though we cannot be “trusted” to figure out that we needed to be somewhere before the actual point at which we were required.

My bags came into Tirana opened with things missing out of them.  As far as I can tell, there are about $300 dollars worth of teaching books, new clothes, my graduation regalia, and a knife that I bought specifically because I’ve been told there are no good knifes here that has gone missing.  That is my current understanding, but that bag has yet to have a full go-over since it has been put in storage.

The people who made the report kept trying to explain where the bag had been gone through and who had done it - crazy speak. I don’t care what they think happened, I wanted them to do what they were supposed to do and file the reports so that if something was found, which I’m sure it won’t be, I could get it back. I wasn’t interested on how you think the Americans shook all my stuff out and that I was sure to find a note one day somewhere in my luggage to know that they had confiscated my new set of boxer-briefs.

There’s also a sour taste in my mouth where things, in general, seem very contradictory. The Peace Corps is constantly asserting this anti-one-story narrative and then they turn around and insist on the same thing within our blogs. They say that we are not to tell our whole story or our whole experience in the country, we are not to do this because this would… be more than the one positive story? Some how people will just latch on to our bad experiences and not our good? It doesn’t quite matter to me though because I have yet to get blog training, other than a brief exposure to this fact that we’re encouraged to spin a single narrative.

It is currently 6am and I’m down in the dining area typing. The country seems very similar to Costa Rica as far as development and is really quite stunning with the houses and mountains jetting into the sky in the background. I can’t wait to get back into the classroom.