During our two-day staging in Alexandria, Virginia, I got to meet and bond with the other 47 PCVs in G79, learn a lot about service and the Peace Corps in general, and got really excited for Panama! We got to explore Alexandria at night and even ventured to DC on the Metro to watch the fireworks on the National Mall on the evening of the 4th of July. That was such a cool experience.
We focused a LOT on PC's ten Core Expectations for volunteers through discussions, acting out scenarios we may face, etc. We came up with a little tagline/catch phrase for each and shamelessly threw out these lines whenever possible throughout staging. The third core expectation is Serve where the Peace Corps asks you to go, under conditions of hardship if necessary, and with the flexibility needed for effective service for which our line was "Go with the flow." This has been our motto the past two days, as our travel plans got thrown for a loop. Our flight to Atlanta yesterday was delayed three hours due to thunderstorms, so we missed our flight to Panama. We were able to reschedule alternate flights for all 48 of us today; we had people flying through DC, Miami, Orlando, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Mexico, and El Salvador. I was in the El Salvador group, and we made it here but then weren't allowed to board our connecting flight to Panama City due to issues with our visas. So they put us in the VIP lounge of the San Salvador airport to wait for the issues to be resolved - we've been here all day enjoying the free food and wifi, hanging out, and we were able to get on another flight through a different airline tonight. Many thanks to the kind folks at the San Salvador airport and the hard work of some of our group members to get this all figured out.
Thank goodness for everyone's good sense of adventure and humor :) I am really geeked about how great my group is, I am so glad they will be my family for the next two years! And after a 25+ hour delay I can't wait to finally arrive in Panama tonight. Hasta pronto!
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