I've been thinking about starting this blog for several weeks now but keep telling myself I should wait until I get my invite. I'm now feeling very discouraged and wonder if I ever will be going into the Peace Corps or at least how many more months it will be. It just seems like there is always another hurdle and each mountain is taller than the last. I've wanted to be a Peace Corps volunteer for so long. I have many memories in high school of saying that this was my goal for the future but I think it was probably in middle school that the dream was born. I remember meeting a returned volunteer at 4-H winter camp and writing about my goal of serving in Peace Corps in my Spanish autobiography and newspaper articles after I won Fairest of the Fair. I remember my mom sharing with me how she had wanted to serve when she was in college but it never worked out and my dad telling me how he thought about joining after he retired from the Marines but that they wouldn't take him because of intelligence work. As soon as I arrived at college in Madison I looked up info about the RPCV group and found the date of the next info session. I convinced my friend Ivy that lived down the hall and my RA Anna to come with me. Anna started her application a few months later when she wasn't sure what to do after college. She also struggled through a long process before leaving for Cape Verde a week before I returned from studying abroad in Kenya.
My time in Kenya was when I floundered in my devotion to this organization and began questioning if it was something I really wanted to do. There were two volunteers that lived outside my village and I got to know them when they came to the internet cafe or were hanging around town. I also spent a week in a very small town working at the dispensary. Another volunteer lived there and I spent a lot of time talking with her. All three of these volunteers were doing health work and were frustrated at the lack of things for them to do and lack of knowledge, ideas, and support they got from the Peace Corps. I wasn't so sure this was something I wanted to do. At the same time I was realizing that I really was interested in Public Health and wanted to go down this career path.
Fast forward a year and a half and I graduated from the UW in Dec 2006 with no real plan of what was coming next. That January I travelled to New Orleans with my boyfriend Ashu where I visited Tulane's School of Public Health. I decided I wanted to go there and was seriously considering their Master's International program after talking to a couple students. I spent the month of February on the island of Santo Antao, Cape Verde with my friend Anna and got to see what her PC experience teaching English was like. I knew that I wouldn't want to teach but thought that I still might be interested in PC if I could have the combined experienced with grad school which could give me the education to actually do something while I served and the support of the university during my time volunteering.
I'm now finishing up my second semester at Tulane with only 3 weeks of classes to go and impatiently wanting to know when and where I'll be going. I applied for Peace Corps in March 2007 and was nominated last June. I got medical clearance in October but then was medically deferred in January after I informed them of my Lasik surgery in late December. When I asked the PC nurse about the surgery back in August I was told that it wouldn't hold up anything as long as it was planned for 3 months before I was nomianted to leave. Turns out it did hold things up since I wasn't medically cleared again until March 21. Here I am 3 1/2 months after my surgery and I'm worried that my vision isn't as good as it should be. I'm also having issues with dry eyes that won't go away. I'm been on Restatis eye drops since mid January and as of this past Wednesday I started a steroid drop that I have to use for 2 weeks. If this doesn't work, I don't have any really good options. I'll find out more once I get back to WI and can see my eye dr.
Now I'm just waiting to hear from my placement officer about an invitation to serve which will let me know when, where, and what I'll be doing. I'd really like some answers after this long wait. It seems like it might continue for even longer though.....
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