Hot Diggety, I'm Going Home!

As most of cyber world knows by now (becuase I've posted this news just about everyone on the internet), Will and I applied to the Peace Corps back in April/May and have been waiting since to hear whether we'd get rejected or accepted. Today we were accepted and nominated to depart for Latin America next June. If you're interested in WHY and HOW and have 10 minutes to spare, by all means please keep reading. If not, you can get smaller doses of what's been happening with our Peace Corps plans here.

How It All Began

Let me give some background information on how this little adventure of an idea came about. I like to travel, Will likes to travel, we both like living abroad because it's just so darn great. After our little Boston fiasco, we decided that we were moving abroad and we weren't sure when we'd be "coming back" (if ever". That's where grad school comes into the picture. Being US citizens and all that jazz we could have very well gone to school in America and gotten some financial aid and worked as many hours and at any job our little hearts desired while we studied. The reality of that was, being that America is the land of non-trained translators who dare call themselves translators, there was only one state that offered a really good translation program I'd go to and that was in Monterrey, California. But school is 2 years in America and costs about 30K a year, blah, blah, blah...to expensive...not exciting enough. To make a long story short out of all of the English-speaking countries in the world, we chose New Zealand and Australia because they were the most affordable and the furthest and most "exotic" countries that offered degrees in what we wanted to study.

The Realisation

Shortly after arriving in OZ, we decided that living abroad was really nice and that we hoped to keep this whole jettsetting life as a permanent feature in our lives. We decided that we wanted to go to Latin America afterwards because I'm studying to be a Spanish-English translator and Will speaks Spanish and Latin America has generation and generations worth of development work to be done as a region. Deciding where to move is easier said than done. Unless you're lucky enought to have EU citizenship, you run into the Catch-22 of that: You will not get offered a job unless you have a work visa, but you will not be offered a work visa unless you have a job offer. How you get around that, I have no idea.

Easy solution: Peace Corps
That solution was also easier said than done. You can't just decided where you want to go and have the Peace Corps send you there. You go where you are needed and if that place happens to be your first geographical preference, then great. Latin America is apparently a hotspot for volunteers...everyone wants to go because they want to become fluent in Spanish. We wanted to go because we wanted to live there. So naturally, the more interest there is in a place, the more competition there is. I was so sure we were going to Eastern Europe or Asia and that I would be an ESL teacher because I've been teaching ESL for almost a year and that's where they send ESL teachers and tutors- to Eastern Europe and Asia.

The Cosmos

We must have been in the system at the right time, with the right skills, with the right availability because we GOT LUCKY. It is very hard to place two volunteers at the same time because most places only request one volunteer. I've been wanting to move back to Latin America for ages...and now I'm finally going back.

The 'rents

Now I've just got to tell the parents that their only daughter and most academically acheived daughter is choosing to become a volunteer in a non-industrialised country for 2.25 years making $200 per month working with at-risk youth instead of getting a snazzy office job in some stuffy cubicle making $2500 per month. No, they don't know yet. I went away to grad school because I wanted to get a well-paid job, remember?