I leave Colorado and fly to Philadelphia on the morning of September 14th. I then spend the night of the 14th in Philly because on the 15th, the 50 of us going to Cameroon have a one day orientation in Philadelphia. Then on the 16th at around 6pm, we take an overnight flight from JFK international airport to Brussels, Belgium, arriving in Brussels at around 8am. We then have a three hour layover in Brussels and get on another flight to Douala (the largest city in Cameroon). From there, we take a short 50 minute flight to the capital of Cameroon, Yaoundé, arriving around 6pm on September 17th, a full 24 hours after we left the United States.
From there, as I understand, we will stay in a hotel in Yaoundé for the first few days and we will be completing a lot of administrative tasks and very basic safety and security training. Two current Volunteers (one health Volunteer and one agriculture Volunteer) will meet us at the airport and make sure we have all of our luggage and get us onto a bus. The bus will take us to a hotel near the Peace Corps regional office where we'll spend three days opening bank accounts, getting Cameroonian numbers and phone plans, doing onboarding tasks, meeting Peace Corps staff, visiting the office, getting some vaccinations, and filling out surveys to get placed with a host family in the training town (basically where they ask you what you do/don’t like, if you have things that are important to you etc). We will also be doing our first LPI (a conversation in French that places us in our initial training group). The cool thing about staying in a hotel for three days is that we get to pick our roommate and I already have mine picked and it's making me more and more excited.
After three days they’ll get us onto a bus again with all of our stuff to head to our pre-service training town. When we arrive, our host families will pick us up at the training center and take us and our belongings to our new homes for the next ten and a half weeks. We will have the weekend with our host families before training starts. Most likely we will not be the first Volunteer my family has hosted, and the town is familiar with Peace Corps, so that's a nice relief. Then we start 10 and a half weeks of language, cultural, and technical training so that when we get sworn in at the end of pre-service training (on December 3rd), we are prepared well to go to our final sites.
Those first few weeks are going to be a whirlwind and are going to be pretty crazy, but I will still try to update my blog as much as possible, once I get into a routine and things kind of settle down a bit.
T-minus 5 days until I leave for Philly! This could be my last post in the United States! My emotions are all over the place. I'm excited, scared, nervous, anxious, hopeful, confident, and many other things. It's terrifying leaving the only country I've ever called home, but I could not be more ready to go on this journey of a lifetime. I'm as ready as I can be. Parts of it are going to be hard, but I am ready for this.
One of the best and easiest ways to stay in touch with me while I am in Cameroon is WhatsApp. This is a FREE app that allows texting and calling internationally at no cost and is super easy to use! I should still have social media too, so messaging me on those sites are also good ways to stay in contact. I will be getting a Cameroon phone number, so I will NOT be using my American phone number. This means I will not be answering your texts or calls if you try to contact me that way. I do want to stay in touch with people from home, so please do reach out over social media or WhatsApp!