Almost There

Well the past two months have flown by, and we'll be boarding a plane to Johannesburg on Thursday after staging (like orientation) in Arlington on Wednesday. It's been surreal saying goodbye to people almost everyday, packing, taking care of personal business, and just having a relaxing, fun summer. The anticipation is definitely different than the first time around since we have a much better idea of what to expect and we'll have each other, but it is still pretty difficult to wrap our heads around being out of the country and away from family and friends for the next 2 to 4 years. We're definitely looking forward to visits, and once we get a better idea of our school holidays, we'll let people know so you can start booking your tickets!

Once we arrive in South Africa, we'll continue on to our training site which is about an hour north of Pretoria. The first week we'll live in dorms, but then after that we will move in with our host family. We'll be learning to speak Setswana in addition to technical and other training. Training lasts about 8 weeks and our swearing in will take place on September 17th. We should get our site placement about halfway through training. During training, we won't have much access to the internet, and I'm not sure when we'll be able to get a SIM card for our phone, but we'll update when we can and probably more often when we get to our site.