Final pre-Africa blog

So I am officially a Peace Corps Trainee. It feels very strange to have that title. On the one hand I am so very excited to be heading to Malawi tomorrow. On the other, I find myself much more saddened to be leaving my girlfriend, along with other friends and family. I will be going from talking to Sarah roughly 2-5 hours a day on the phone, to no internet or phone access for the next 3 months. I am excited as well as concerned.

The training has been great. I think that I expected it to be very dull and uninformative, but Peter, or staging director, has done a great job of getting us involved and we have all learned a lot. My Staging group is AWESOME. There are 26 of us heading to Malawi and we already seem to have this really cool Peace Corps bond. Although I would say I am the loudest and most annoying one, we have some other outgoing peeps along with the reserved ones. We have different backgrounds but similar interests and so on. I am really excited to get to know everyone better over the next years.

I just wanted to share with everyone some of my Aspirations and Anxieties which were really good to write out on paper and share with the other trainees and see that I am not the only one. So here they our in no specific order so you can feel free to pray for this or anything else would be appreciated:

Aspirations – learn a new language and culture, experience new things, help out in Malawi, learn to SCUBA, travel, make a difference, make great friends, make great photographs, develop my teaching style and become a master teacher, learn more about myself, the unknown

Axieties – missing my friends, family and one girl in particular, boredom, loneliness, ineffectiveness, not fitting in, everything changing when I am gone, missing cheese, my cat, hygiene, the internet and other amenities, reintegration, getting sick, HIV/Aids, the unknown.

So as I head to Malwi, please remember me and write me as this will be my last internet post for around 3 months. Thank you for all your love and support. I miss you and hope to read from you soon. In closing I want to end with a quote from an Australian aboriginal woman:

If you came here to save me and my people, you can go home again. If however, you see your future united with ours then perhaps we can work together.

Love, Spencer