Goodbye Boston, See Ya Later America

I think this might be the last time I get on the internet for a couple months, so I thought I'd go ahead and post something.
We have completed staging, and tomorrow (Sunday) morning we head out bright and early for the airport and our ride to Uganda. We'll get there late Monday evening. It's a long way over there. When we get there we will spend about a week in Entebbe, where the airport is, then off to our training site and homestay families in a town a couple hours North of Entebbe.

So far my Peace Corps experience has been very positive. I've had fun meeting the other people in my group and the few PC staff we have met so far. We are all in this together and we all have many of the same ideals and thoughts and we have all been through the application and leaving process thus far, and we are all in this together. It's a good group. There's 37 of us of diverse backgrounds, ages, religions, a few married people. I like the group. We're having fun.

I was prepared for staging to be full of anxiety and nervousness, but it really hasn't been like that for me. I'm enjoying myself. Not to say I feel no stress at all, just to say that it is fairly minimal.

We have had workshops that have been kind of an introductory overview of some things like cultural adaption, what is development, how to stay safe, and malaria medicines. They've also started throwing lots of acronyms and abbreviations at us. This evening we went to the JFK library for the PC 45th anniversary celebration, and that was a cool event. We toured the library, had some group photos taken by the PC media services, attended a reception and mingled with returned peace corps volunteers (RPCV), some staff, and other related folks, then they had a program, part of which honored the first volunteer groups which went to Ghana and Tanganyika, and those groups symbolically passed the torch to our group heading for Uganda tomorrow. It was cool to meet lots of people involved in this PC thing, and some RPCV from Uganda who gave us encouragement and perspective on thier service, and we made some contacts that may come in handy someday during our service.

Here is my address for the next 10 weeks in case anyone wants to send me something. hint, hint. Note that it may take around three weeks for letters and a couple months for packages.
And just because I won't have much internet access, (or no access for a bit) doesn't mean you can't send me email. :)

Nathan Epp, Peace Corps Trainee
P.O. Box 29348
Kampala, Uganda

I hope everyone is doing well. Talk at you "soon". :)

Nathan