Still Thinking

I looked at the letter from my recruiter again and it actually says "English Teacher Trainer", not "English Teaching", so maybe I'm wrong about them wanting us to just teach English. I haven't seen any blogs or anything on the Peace Corps sight that talks about training teachers or any other college students in China in anything but the English language, but I suppose we shall see.

I want to be excited about it, I do, I'm just not. Doing placements here in Japan, though, I know how presumptuous I think people are when they start making demands about where they should be. That's why I'm just trying to ride this out. Obviously, the placement they suggest is the one I'm most qualified for, it's just not what I thought I would be getting with the Peace Corps. I'm trying to reconcile my qualifications and figure out just why I would prefer to go someplace else.

I've also thought about some of the good points -- I mean, my kanji study here in Japan will still be somewhat useful in China and at least having a basic grasp of Mandarin could really boost my chances of getting into the foreign service later down the road. That's if I really put some effort into learning -- I wasn't such a great student here in Japan. I have a different perspective going into it this time, though, so I think it will motivate me to do better.

Peace Corps wise, if anyone is interested in time lines, here is how things have shaped up for me...

The SO and I completed our applications in late February. We were contacted by the recruiter by e-mail on March 10th. She informed us that our legal kits had been sent. The husband never received his, so we had to request another be sent. I kept in constant contact with the recruiter after this and I'm glad I did, because not all the information I needed was included in the original mailing -- for example, she wanted a copy of our marriage certificate, but didn't tell me that until after I double-checked that I was sending all the necessary documents.

We finally got word that our legal kits were received in early April. We set up a phone interview for April 27th. The phone interview was 3 hours long -- one for each of us and then one for us both together (holding the phone between us to hear the questions, then passing the it back and forth to answer). It was a little exhausting since we had to stay up from 10pm to nearly 1am due to the time difference, but otherwise it was fine. The questions were nearly verbatim from the Peace Corps Wiki interview questions list, so if anyone wants to prepare, they should use those.

Let's see... after the interview, she told us that we had to wait until May to pass our name on to the "couple's review board" and in the meantime, we should look for a French program to re-up our skill levels. The panel meeting took place around May 26th and we heard about the program on June 6th. Now we are waiting to receive our medical kits, which we should get in the next month. I have no idea how we'll get them finished before we leave Japan, but we'll gambarimasu.