UPDATE: the invitation is on the way

I worked out with my mother, the 20 minute Joel Olsteen workout. And at the end I told her how this morning I checked my application status on Peace Corps' site, and it said that they have sent an invitation to me. It didn't say exactly where, or when it leaves, but that it will be here within 10 days.

Sitting on the floor, I said how it is less of a big deal now. There are important question marks, but there's none of the dread and fear of the first time, wondering if this is right for me, if I can do it. I told her how I am glad to have had 1 year home (if I leave next September), and how it is longer than if I transferred to Benin, as I had thought while still in Lima, Peru. It seems that the friends of mine that have transferred have felt like outsiders, in the fact that they have no self-identified group, no B-47, or E19. Their training for the country was an ad hoc crash course lasting less than 2 weeks. Many of the staff doesn't know their name, and they got none of the grand ouvertures meant to ease the new volunteers into a country. Not only that, but in Ecuador or Paraguay, they speak a lot of Quechua and Guarani, which none of us learned in depth. Add to that frustration of trying to accomplish something within the remainder of the 12 month agreement, and it's a sad situation made unpleasant and rendered frustrating and unfulfilling.

"It sounds sort of like going to high school and starting halfway through the year" my mother said. "No matter how many friends, you will still never fit completely with the others, or have the same experience."

"Yes, and the teachers don't recognize you, and the subjects you take don't correspond with what you have learned..." I added, 'so that you are way ahead in one thing, and completely behind the others in another class."

The benefits of going to Morocco in this way--as a person reenrolling for the full thing--I see now far surpass these concerns. So, in a way it is a relief. I'd show up at staging, just like before. We'd all fly in the same plane together across the Atlantic to North Africa. There would be diplomatic welcomings by local leaders, by the older groups who have come to town to see the fresh volunteers step off the plane. We'd stay in the same rooms at hotels and get ample opportunity to know each other and quickly reach viability. Thirty or fifty of us would come back for further refinement at the 6 month mark, and then again at 1 year meds. For three months we'd get to have lunch with the staff, and our professors, fully absorbing the Moroccan lifestyle visible in them, and adjusting our expectations. Arabic and French would become the norm, and we'd be close by each other when family and girlfriends come to visit from the States, or from Italy, giving us the opportunity to laugh together and remember when we were as fresh as they, and sharing the first views together of the dunes stretching beyond the horizon for 5,000 kilometers towards the Synai peninsula, and the Atlas stretching miles above us.

The stay might be longer, but it will pay great dividends to get to do it right. I'm proud of those volunteers that immediately jumped back into the fray. It's sad to think that a hard situation was made more demanding, but I feel that each will find their routine. Bolivia wasn't easy, and I can't forget that. I do not know how I would have done to enter a different Latin country straight from that. It would have been maddening if I had gone to somewhere so extreme from where I had been. I don't think a person could do it any way but the standard experience that I will have by going through the whole shebang directly.

It helps knowing the country already in my prior adventure there. Writing these words and thinking of what I had learned from having done PC one time in Bolivia, I will have to review what I said before. Going to Morocco for Peace Corps, no big deal? That's lunacy. While the Peace Corps process may be underwhelming the second time around--it's still very much the government--I'd be making a mistake if I were to underestimate this just because I'd known something similar in a wholly different country.

It's a slow burn. Like I wrote before while in Bolivia: the difference between tourism and Peace Corps is that you stay long enough to discern. To differentiate, to get the nuances. And so the flat whirlwind of travel is transformed into a rich and vibrant tapestry that gives more to you the more that you look at it.

And in that way, I can only expect to be overwhelmed. And that is impossible to underestimate. Of course.... at the same time, it's just Peace Corps. It's not a 150 mile ultramarathon across the toughest parts of the Sahara in Morocco.