Richard’s Reckless Travels

July 25th

On our last morning as Peace Corps Trainees, we all had to get up wicked early again due to our swearing in ceremony starting at 8:30. The ceremony was at a real nice hotel down the street from the Peace Corps office and started off with a ceremony to thank the host families for allowing us to stay in their homes for the last 3 months. My family didn’t show up…so they gave out a bunch of certificates to the families and everybody socialized with their families following the ceremony. I ended up strolling around awkwardly with Joanna Pezko and my buddy Shyra pretending that we had somewhere to go and people to talk with.

After 15 minutes of socializing, they brought us all in the conference room where the U.S. ambassador, training staff, host families, MINED representative, and 7 news crews were to watch us to swear in as formal volunteers. It was by far the biggest hoopla over something that I’ve ever been a part of. We had to sing the Nicaraguan national anthem, the U.S. national anthem, and go through the formalities of the ceremony before hearing speeches by two of our fellow volunteers. For us SBD volunteers, we elected Avi to give a speech about our host families, which ended up being well thought out and endearing. Joey gave the speech during the big ceremony with the press and ambassador and gave us quite a surprise. He ended up dedicating a part of his speech to each trainee in each of the training towns and transitioning his clothes from business casual to a traditional Nicaraguan dress that he had been wearing underneath his clothes. This really didn’t go over highly with the ambassador, and made the training staff super nervous, but we all got a huge kick out of it.

After the ceremony, we had a pizza and mingling session with the Peace Corps staff before finally going to our respective hotels. I went with a couple of the SBD volunteers down to the mall and picked up some clothes for the celebration we were going to have that night for officially being Peace Corps volunteers. Coincidentally, I ended up finding a Bata shoe store (a Czech shoe store). Also by chance, it ended up being the only shoe store in the mall that had shoes that would fit me – can you say fate? Thank you Prague, I love you. We also picked up some custom shirts for our trainee group, Nica 47. Joanna, my friend whose family didn’t show up to the ceremony, drew a design that we ended up putting on a bunch of t-shirts to recognise how flipping awesome we all are. The shirts look great and have the very appropriate Nicaraguan phrase: “Hasta 2010…Si Dios Quiere”, or “Until 2010, if God wants”.

We ended up making a reservation for 37 people at a club near the PC office and hung out there the whole night. It was good to unwind with everybody in the group before heading off to our sites this weekend. Gonna miss them.

Nica 47 SBD

Nica 47 TEFL

Joey – after disrobing