Nicaragua: Peace Corps Beginnings

What could have been a better farewell from Minnesota besides a snowstorm? I woke up Tuesday morning ready to depart for Washington, D.C. only to see that at least a half a foot of snow had fallen overnight in the Twin Cities. I boarded the plane on time, but we were forced to wait for two hours before taking off because all of the planes needed to be de-iced and have the snow removed from their wings. My arrival into Washington was a bit late, needless to say, but I was able to make it to our staging event and join in without a problem.

At staging I met the other 31 volunteers in my training group in Nicaragua, and we can already tell that these next two years will be great. There was a little scare that we weren't going to be able to depart from Washington this morning on our 6am flight (since the blizzard followed me east) but luckily we were only delayed about 40 minutes this time around.

At this point we are all pretty tired and exhausted due to not getting much sleep last night and adjusting to our current 90 degree weather. Nevertheless we are happily settled into Nicaragua, ready to "suck it up" and "do work" as we discussed at our staging event. The whole group will be together in these next few days and we will split into smaller groups in different training towns after that.

We may be tired and uncertain about what is coming next, but the excitement level is off the charts.