Lesson #1: Expect the Unexpected

The past 7 days have been a whirlwind of emotions - both positive and negative. As of July 27 Will and I will become RPCTs, also known as Returned Peace Corps Trainees. That acronym doesn't exist in the Peace Corps glossary, I just made it up because better than labeling yourself as an ETer (a volunteer or trainee who chooses an early termination of their service). I remember saying that I would not be one of those ETers, I wouldn't be one of those statistics, "I just spent a whole year trying to get through this application process! There's no way I'm backing out now!". That was until we knew that we actually KNEW there was an alternative way to live abroad. Our two years in Peace Corps were probably going to be our last two years living abroad for a while and we were going to go out in style!

I'm sure everyone is interested in knowing why we we're now labeled as "the volunteers that couldn't", so here's the story...

As many of the loyal readers of this blog may (or may not) know, before Peace Corps/El Salvador we were post graduate students in Australia. In late 2004 we bought a one way ticket to Australia with the intention of staying there after our studies. As our studies were drawing to a close we didn't see how there would be any way that we could extend our stay with the resources we were able to access at that time. We both wanted to continue working and living abroad and Peace Corps seems like the perfect way to continue doing that, and do some really good work for the global community along the way.

Everyone in my training group will agree with me on the absolute fact that Peace Corps is hard work for several reasons and you WILL and DO have days where you simply don't want to be there and can barely remember what possessed you to apply to Peace Corps in the first place. On one of those such days, instead of just complaining about the millions of flesh eating mosquito's that attack you when you visit the spider infested bathroom, we tried to be constructive about the situation. "What can we do to make ourselves feel better and feel like we can do this?". I knew that once we moved to our sites everything would turn out just fine because we'd have control over our lives again and wouldn't have to eat beans for the third meal in a row or rice with dead ants in it if we didn't feel like it.

If your plan was to live abroad while achieving the most stable life-style possible and you had the option of living abroad for 2 years earning $265 or 5-10 years earning $1,500+ per month, where in both options you'd be doing something you enjoyed...What would you choose?

Stay tuned for Lesson #2: The Juicy Bits: Why We Really ETed