Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Yellow Fever
Yesterday, the Peace Corps contacted me and Lisa about getting prepared for our staging and departure. We need to do several things before we leave, including applying for visas and Peace Corps passports. Most of what we have to do is just paperwork, but we also need to get a yellow fever vaccination.
Last night, Lisa and I went to an office in downtown Santa Cruz to get the vaccination. They had mentioned over the phone that they had enough of the vaccination for the two of us. When we approached the front desk to ask the nurse about getting the yellow fever vaccination, she informed us that the would not give us a yellow fever vaccine without a "travel consultation" with their doctor. This service is $300 per person. That doesn't include the extra $200 per person for the actual vaccination. Oh, and they don't take insurance.
No thanks. I'll find someone else to give us the vaccine that won't cost us $1000.
UPDATE: Lisa and I did get our yellow fever vaccines at Safeway for a little over $120 per person. Definitely much more reasonable. Lisa felt a little ill from the vaccine, but I felt fine. Now we're all set for staging!
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Invitation!
Today I will do as many Peace Corps volunteers do. I'm creating a blog that I'll use to chronicle my experiences in a completely new place. Today, Lisa (my wife) and I finally received our invitation to serve in the Peace Corps after almost 16 months of anticipation.
We submitted our initial online application on March 31, 2010. We were ready for anything, even though we knew that there is a requirement that all couples must be married for 12 months in order for the Peace Corps to allow us to serve together. We had been engaged for over 10 months, so in the beginning of April, we filled out the papers to show that we were legally married. We really wanted to get the ball rolling, and in my idealistic mind, we would be heading to some corner of the world in May or June of 2011. "Easy," I thought.
We had our initial interview in May of 2010, and our recruiter told us that while we were qualified to serve, there were no positions available that would accommodate both of us at the same time. We were told that new nominations are always coming out, and that we should wait and see what happened at the end of May.
In the months that followed, we got married in front of family and friends in July. I received my graduate degree and started teaching at Penn State in August. We began to look for backup plans in case a position didn't open up for the two of us. Lisa and I both applied to graduate school in late November.
Nomination! The first of December brought our first big step towards serving. Lisa fielded the phone call which sent us towards giddy thoughts of mud houses and teaching third-world children about America. The Peace Corps representative gave us some key phrases that we would repeat to our friends and relatives in the coming months: "Sub-Saharan Africa," "Math and English teachers," "September 2011." And the representative gave Lisa this tantalizing clue: "Your husband's French will come in handy."
We searched and searched, guessing again and again at our future country-of-service. Togo? Benin? Cameroon? There were nine countries that we thought would fit our nomination. We really had very little to go on.
The medical clearance part of our application came next. We needed physicals, dental exams, blood tests, the polio vaccine, I needed glasses and a podiatrist appointment, Lisa needed her wisdom teeth removed. We spent much of the month of January in various offices.
Finally, we reviewed all of the medical forms and checklists, and we submitted our medical packets on February 22, 2011.
And then we waited. We were excited at the prospect of hearing about our medical clearance, which would bump us to the placement office. The clearance isn't as fast as you might think. There are thousands and thousands of people doing the same things we were. We were cleared for our dental health in March. In May, Lisa and I were preparing to move to California for the summer, so I decided to call and see if we needed to visit our doctor to finish any work that we forgot.
We were almost there. Our nurse told me that we were missing one blood test. We immediately scheduled an appointment and had our blood drawn. We left Pennsylvania on June 3rd, before the results came back. As we crossed the country, we got the news that we were now fully medically cleared.
We were in the home stretch. We now had a placement officer who would review our application and compare us with other applicants who were vying for the very same positions. We had heard over and over that a nomination is not the same as an invitation. We had hoped that the experience that we had been building would be enough and that we would finish the hardest job application known to us. Finally, we had an interview scheduled for July 11.
Our interview was scary. We were in the Pacific Time Zone, so we had to schedule our interview for 6 AM in order for our schedules to work with the Eastern Time Zone. We were tired, but excited. At the end of the interview, we finally heard what we had been waiting for 16 months to hear: our invitation would be in the mail.
Which brings us to today. We received our prize. We'll be heading to Mozambique in late September.
We submitted our initial online application on March 31, 2010. We were ready for anything, even though we knew that there is a requirement that all couples must be married for 12 months in order for the Peace Corps to allow us to serve together. We had been engaged for over 10 months, so in the beginning of April, we filled out the papers to show that we were legally married. We really wanted to get the ball rolling, and in my idealistic mind, we would be heading to some corner of the world in May or June of 2011. "Easy," I thought.
We had our initial interview in May of 2010, and our recruiter told us that while we were qualified to serve, there were no positions available that would accommodate both of us at the same time. We were told that new nominations are always coming out, and that we should wait and see what happened at the end of May.
In the months that followed, we got married in front of family and friends in July. I received my graduate degree and started teaching at Penn State in August. We began to look for backup plans in case a position didn't open up for the two of us. Lisa and I both applied to graduate school in late November.
Nomination! The first of December brought our first big step towards serving. Lisa fielded the phone call which sent us towards giddy thoughts of mud houses and teaching third-world children about America. The Peace Corps representative gave us some key phrases that we would repeat to our friends and relatives in the coming months: "Sub-Saharan Africa," "Math and English teachers," "September 2011." And the representative gave Lisa this tantalizing clue: "Your husband's French will come in handy."
We searched and searched, guessing again and again at our future country-of-service. Togo? Benin? Cameroon? There were nine countries that we thought would fit our nomination. We really had very little to go on.
The medical clearance part of our application came next. We needed physicals, dental exams, blood tests, the polio vaccine, I needed glasses and a podiatrist appointment, Lisa needed her wisdom teeth removed. We spent much of the month of January in various offices.
Finally, we reviewed all of the medical forms and checklists, and we submitted our medical packets on February 22, 2011.
And then we waited. We were excited at the prospect of hearing about our medical clearance, which would bump us to the placement office. The clearance isn't as fast as you might think. There are thousands and thousands of people doing the same things we were. We were cleared for our dental health in March. In May, Lisa and I were preparing to move to California for the summer, so I decided to call and see if we needed to visit our doctor to finish any work that we forgot.
We were almost there. Our nurse told me that we were missing one blood test. We immediately scheduled an appointment and had our blood drawn. We left Pennsylvania on June 3rd, before the results came back. As we crossed the country, we got the news that we were now fully medically cleared.
We were in the home stretch. We now had a placement officer who would review our application and compare us with other applicants who were vying for the very same positions. We had heard over and over that a nomination is not the same as an invitation. We had hoped that the experience that we had been building would be enough and that we would finish the hardest job application known to us. Finally, we had an interview scheduled for July 11.
Our interview was scary. We were in the Pacific Time Zone, so we had to schedule our interview for 6 AM in order for our schedules to work with the Eastern Time Zone. We were tired, but excited. At the end of the interview, we finally heard what we had been waiting for 16 months to hear: our invitation would be in the mail.
Which brings us to today. We received our prize. We'll be heading to Mozambique in late September.
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