Cancelled

First, the facts:

Yesterday we got yet another call from Peace Corps, during which we were informed that not only will we not leaving for Mauritania on time, we will not be leaving for Mauritania at all: our staging group has been cancelled. Peace Corps' official explanation is they have not been able to make any headway on the visa situation. They are not pulling out the current volunteers and assured us that our cancellation has nothing to do with the incident in the capital on Tuesday (http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE55M5DS20090623).

We spoke with our Placement Officer last night to determine our next steps. She is working on finding a new assignment for us, which could be anywhere in the world (not just French-speaking Africa). She will be looking at August-October departures, which supposedly is the earliest we can hope for. The good news is she said she should have a new assignment for us next week.

Now, some stream-of-consciousness reactions to the news, in no particular order:

We're frustrated, of course, but we're also a bit relieved. If this is the direction things are going in Mauritania, then we really may have dodged a bullet here. We are confident that we will have a great experience no matter where we end up going. However, going back to not knowing where we're going or when we're leaving is NOT fun. We feel incredibly fortunate that we were able to get our jobs back for the summer and we can live with Jacob's parents. We're bummed that we will most likely not be serving with many of the very cool invitees we have gotten to know (electronically of course) over the past couple of months. There is a decent chance that some of us will be reassigned to the same countries though, so we're keeping our fingers crossed on that. We will have more time to see friends and family while we're waiting, which is nice. We know that placing couples is significantly more difficult than placing individuals, so we REALLY hope that we don't end up delayed past the fall because of that. If we end up going somewhere non-tropical, we will have to rethink some of the clothes we intended to bring. We need to rename our blog, which is frustrating. We learned our lesson here...the new name will NOT have a country name in it. Stay posted for that.

~Sarah

A Slight Delay

We just got the ever dreaded phone call and found out that we will not be leaving for Mauritania on time. Apparently, visas are necessary if you want to go live in a country for the next two years. The Mauritanian government has not yet issued visas to any of the upcoming class of Peace Corps volunteers so there are 58 other volunteers that are just as unlucky as we are. Hopefully after the July elections everything will clear up and Mauritania will start issuing visas again and we will still be able to go. Who knows....

Bottom line - this is totally out of our hands so I am going to do my best not to lose any sleep over it. Hello more time in DC!

Goodbyes

I've never been particularly good at goodbyes, partially because I'm generally not very emotional. It's not that I'm not an emotional person or that I don't miss my friends and family when I'm not with them...it's just that I don't tend to get emotional at that actual moment of exchanging "goodbyes." That is why I was taken completely off guard by how difficult it was to leave CARE. In an attempt to make some sort of sense of the situation, I did what I usually do, which was make a list. Here are some reasons why I think it was so difficult:

-CARE is truly an amazing organization that I've become more attached to than I realized.
-I feel incredibly fortunate that my first non-internship job out of college was such a great fit for me (and is a career path I want to pursue). I know many many people who weren't so lucky.
-I spent 8+ hours a day with the same small highly collaborative team (with only a few staffing changes) for the past 2 1/2 years.
-Our team worked extremely well together, and actually liked each other!
-My supervisor was a hugely supportive mentor that helped me grow by leaps and bounds while working for her team.

Sarah