Staging, and Saying Goodbye: Reflections from the Flight

(written Wednesday, August 28, 2019)

A fifteen hour flight is a long flight.

I’m currently eleven and a half hours into the flight from JFK to Johannesburg, and I’ve slept for a few hours, listened to two and a half episodes of Never Not Funny, and drifted in and out of sleep to Hearts and Bones and The Rhythm of the Saints a handful of times. A fellow trainee seated diagonally in front of me has had the map/flight info screen on for the duration of the flight, and I keep glancing over to see when in the trip we are and where in the world we are. The first few hours seemed interminable, and I got pretty excited when I saw we had passed the six hour mark—but then I realized that meant we weren’t even halfway through.

This lengthy flight is the perfect cap on the end of a long journey that has led to this day: over a year of applications and essays and interviews and medical clearance and legal clearance and passports and visas and packing and preparing and saying goodbye, all leading to this, the first official day as a Peace Corps Trainee in Pre-Service Training (PST). A much longer journey awaits, and we are finally so close.

On Tuesday, we had our all-day staging event at the Hampton Inn in Philadelphia. Staging was a whirlwind of introductions and refreshers to the rules, policies, and procedures of the Peace Corps and our imminent time in PST. We reviewed the three goals of the Peace Corps and the ten core expectations of all volunteers, and we confirmed we were ready to make our commitment. (In a particularly serious moment, we were warned: “If you are not 100% certain you are ready to commit to the Peace Corps, do not get on that bus in the morning.” The air dropped out of the room, and then we nervously moved on to another activity. One person did not get on the bus.)

After spending Monday night in Princeton with Bill and Steph and Abby, my mom and Hannah accompanied me to the hotel for this big day of staging. I checked in, got my bags stowed away, and then we quickly said goodbye. For all of the preparations I have done in the last year, nothing prepared me for that last goodbye. The first core expectation for Peace Corps Volunteers states that volunteers are expected to “prepare [their] personal and professional life to make a commitment to serve abroad for a full term of 27 months.” I think I could have done a better job attempting to prepare myself for the emotional tax of the last week leading up to departure—I was overwhelmed by the enormity of leaving so many dear people just at the last moment—but then again, I’m not sure that I could have done much to prepare. I said goodbye, I cried, and then I walked into a room of strangers, my new 54-person support system and family for the next three months and beyond.

So far, everyone is great. We are a young cohort—many, many people just graduated college this past May, and by my estimate, everyone is under 30. During staging, we had the chance to share some of our anxieties and aspirations for service, and even though on an intellectual level I’ve been telling myself for months that this would be the case, it was incredibly comforting to witness and feel firsthand: we are people from all different backgrounds, but we share so many of the same concerns, anxieties, and dreams. We don’t speak Portuguese. We’re worried about communicating with our host families. We haven’t taught high school before. We fear a grandparent or a pet or a loved one will die while we’re away. We miss our family and our friends already, and we don’t know what our relationships will look like after being across the world for over two years.

But we can’t wait to be fluent in Portuguese. We are looking forward to forging new friendships and meaningful relationships with our counterparts and host families. We’re excited to try pirri pirri chicken and eat fresh mangoes and see brand new constellations at night. We brought stickers for our students and long to see successes measured and potentials fulfilled.

We are overflowing with anxiety and fear and hope and motivation.

We just want to get there already.

“Train in the Distance” just came on my Spotify, and 6357 miles from home, up in the clouds a few hundred miles off the coast of Angola, Paul Simon just whispered in my ear, “The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.” That’s what this is all about, right? Peace Corps Volunteers take the thought that life could be better—for everyone—and hear it not as a complaint, but as a committed, directed call to action.

Three more hours on this flight. Then a quick hour connection to Maputo, Mozambique. Then, I take the first steps in answering that call.