A Long Time in the Making

In a little more than two weeks Kathrina and I will be heading to Ukraine, where we'll spend the next 27 months serving in the Peace Corps.  We've set up this blog as a way to keep our family and friends updated about our experiences in more-or-less real time (rather than coming home two years from now and unloading all of our stories in a single, overwhelming bout of verbal diarrhea!)  Far from being an impulsive move, being invited to serve in the Peace Corps has been a long process, requiring its own brand of dedication and perseverance.  For this reason, our first blog post will describe how we went from the initial application process to actually receiving an invitation to serve in Ukraine.

Even before we met each other, Kathrina and I had both considered the possibility of serving in the Peace Corps. The idea of living abroad, learning a brand new language, and integrating into a culture substantially different from our own sounded both intriguing and challenging.  Once we discovered that we had been thinking the same thing, we would occasionally talk about how cool it would be to actually apply... at some indeterminate point in the future.  Life has a way of crowding out such pie-in-the-sky ideas.

However, in early 2011 we decided to take the plunge and apply to the Peace Corps.  The application process is rather involved.  It begins by sending in detailed personal statements and answering questions about our physical, financial, and marital health.  (Our favorite was, "How do you intend to cope with living in close proximity to your spouse for the next two years?")  Soon after sending in our application materials, we were invited to visit the Peace Corps Midwest Regional Recruitment Office in Chicago for an interview.  The interview lasted for several hours.  First our recruiter, Rok, interviewed Kathrina, then me, then both of us together.  It was all very exciting, because events seemed to be moving along so quickly.

But then came the waiting game.  It wasn't until 2012 that we were actually nominated for a position.  We were supposed to serve in Sub-Saharan Africa and depart that November.  Once nominated we began the next phase of the selection process, which involved obtaining security clearance and undergoing a thorough medical and dental evaluation.  It seemed like we lived in doctors' offices for the next couple of months.  The process was so thorough that I had to re-visit my physician to get a note explaining why my jaw wasn't perfectly symmetrical.  (I don't know why it was necessary to mention it in the medical forms to begin with, but it certainly led to a lot of self-depreciating jokes!)

By the time we finally received our medical clearance, we had already decided to move to the Washington, DC area.  I accepted a position as a AAAS Fellow at the National Science Foundation, and Kathrina used the opportunity to pursue her Master's degree at American University.  Through the Master's International program she was able to combine Peace Corps service with a year of coursework to earn her degree in Teaching English as a Second Language.  However, this decision meant postponing our Peace Corps service for at least a year and getting reshuffled in the placement system; there was no guarantee that we would be sent to the same region of the world (or even get re-nominated for a position at all).

That all changed on May 3, 2013, when we received an official invitation to serve in Ukraine.  (We skipped the nomination process the second time around, because we had already received our medical and security clearances the previous year.)  It's been nearly two and a half years since we took that first step (and we've lived at three addresses since then), but we're finally going!  The excitement sometimes makes it difficult to concentrate on our current work.  Although we certainly aren't looking forward to another interstate move (neither is our cat Gus).

We'll move out of our apartment at the end of August and put all of our belongings into storage (i.e. my dad's basement).  That will also give us the opportunity to visit family and friends for a couple of weeks before we go.  There is still a lot we don't know about the next 27 months.  We do know that a 2-day staging event will take place in the US beginning September 16th.  It is here that we will get to know the other volunteers in our cohort.  We'll depart for Ukraine on September 18th to undergo Pre-Service Training, which lasts for 12 weeks and involves language, cultural and technical training.  Sometime in mid-December we will be officially sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers and be told exactly where in Ukraine we will serve.

One of the the biggest unknowns right now is where in the country we'll serve.  Ukraine is the largest country wholly within Europe (about the same size as Texas) and varies from the Carpathian Mountains in the west, to vast plains that form the breadbasket of Europe, to the industrialized east, to the Muslim Tartar-influenced Crimean Peninsula in the south.  Most volunteers (~80%) are placed in small to medium sized towns and villages, but the other 20% find themselves serving in larger urban areas.  (Nobody is placed near Chernobyl...)  We can't wait to find out which one of these diverse areas we'll be calling home until December 13, 2015!

The other big unknown is what language we will be learning.  The official language is Ukrainian, but there is a gradient from west to east, with Ukrainian being more common in the west (near Europe) and Russian being progressively more common in the east (near Russia, naturally).  The languages are similar (think of the similarities between Italian and Spanish), and most volunteers become reasonably fluent in both by the time they end their service.  In order to get a leg up on the language before training, we've been using Rosetta Stone to learn Russian.  Three months seems like an awfully short time to absorb a language that we'll have to use on a daily basis, so any extra knowledge we can start with certainly can't hurt! 

We intend to post new entries to this blog at least once a month, so check back often!