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