No Longer the Newbies

You may be surprised to know that I’ve officially been in country for over six months.  Six months.  That’s a good chunk of time.  Let’s see: six months is 26 weeks, therefore 182 days.   

Now, I really don’t want to give you the wrong impression- I am enjoying my service, and I’m not wishing away the days; however, because my service has a deadline, you do kind of get into the habit of figuring out how much you’ve completed and how much time you’ve got left.  So, as of today, I’ve actually been in country for 192 days.  I only know that because I take my malaria prophylaxis daily, therefore I can keep track of my days.  Anyway, if you figure that we’ll be in service as a volunteer for two years, which is 730 days, and we were in training for 70 days, we have exactly 800 days of service.  Now, that’s not exactly true.  You see, when we “close” our service, which is abbreviated as COS, we cannot all leave on the same day.  Therefore, my COS date currently is April 22, 2013, but it won’t actually be decided until January 2013.  Our group will begin to COS in February and will continue until June 2013.  Therefore, my service could actually be shorter or longer than the 800 days. 

Back to my math.  If you don’t know already, I’m a little nerdy.  I hate to admit, but I do have moments here when I need to keep myself entertained because I’m worried I’ll either embarrass myself by falling asleep or my brain will explode from boredom.  So, I tend to calculate some things.  I’ve completed 192 days out of 800 days.  If you want the fraction of completion, it’s 6/25.  If you want the percentage, it’s 24%.  Can you believe it?  I’ve nearly completed a quarter of my service!  That means we’ve got 608 days to go.  Let’s not forget that we earn two days of vacation every month, when means we get a total of 48 vacation days during our two years of service.  This means, technically, we only have 560 days remaining.  If you want this fraction, it would be 7/10, therefore 70% of our service remaining.  Honestly, 70% sounds like a lot…

Ok, even as I was writing this, I realize that it makes me sound crazy, desperate and negative about the rest of my service.  I’ll try to be clear as possible: I’m enjoying my service, and I have not made a paper chain to count down the days to COS, not yet anyway.

As much as I like numbers and the satisfaction I get from computing all these figures, the fact that actually blows my mind: the new training class has arrived in Uganda.  I would like to say that I jumped for joy when I realized that we are no longer the newbies in country- that is how I felt when I moved on up from being a silly freshman in high school.  However, on this occasion, I had mixed feelings: accomplished for being in country for so long, shocked that it’s already time for a new crew, yet confused because I’ve been in country for so long but still feel so new.  Even though I’ve been at site for four months, I still feel like I am trying to find my place, figure out my job, learning how things work, etc.  I actually had a “fellow” NGO worker ask me what my biggest accomplishments are in my first six months.  She was quite appalled when I said, “Well, my community knows my name, and I think I know what I’m doing.”  But hey, Peace Corps is all about doing things slowly slowly.  We are here for two years, which means, we’ve got time to get to know the place, develop relationships and build sustainable solutions with the people.

Currently, I am at what we in the biz call “IST”, which means In-Service Training- another Peace Corps landmark of service.  It’s basically Peace Corps’ way to check in on us after our first few months at site.  After nearly a week, the most important thing that IST has shown me: I have made some amazing friends in Peace Corps, which sometimes I take for granted.  At site, there are times when I feel alone or that no one really gets me; however, our crew in the East is really tight.  We all may be a little crazy, but we’re very understanding of each other.  We can have a lot of fun (which includes prancing and dancing), but we can also have very deep, meaningful and supportive conversations.  Interestingly enough, we have just discovered that no one in the new training class will be moving out in our direction.  We’ve decided it’s ok.  We don’t need new people.  I’ve got enough people that entertain me, distract me, listen to me, talk to me, console me, dance with me, laugh with me, laugh at me, understand me and love me.  In a short six months, I’ve found a new family: my PCVs in the East.