Tag: jamaica

* Michelle Thoughts, * Peace Corps

Making Headlines

mcmeeshi

Jamaican Observer article about our Peace Corps group: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Peace-Corps-celebrates-50-years-of-service-to-Jamaica_11106257

Don’t ask me why I was selected for this picture but upon our arrival to Jamaica last week, the Jamaican press covered Peace Corps’ 50th anniversary of being in Jamaica. Our entire group attended the ceremony, and now we’re in the paper!

We’ll try to post another video in a few days. In the meantime, I’ve made some small updates to the mailing instructions on our Peace Corps Info page (tab above). Since we’re moving around a lot during training, we’ve been told that it will be easiest to wait until we go to our permanent site in May to get packages. But it’s not a hard and fast rule.

Until next time … -M

* Michelle Thoughts, * Peace Corps

Jamaica: Second Hand (Part Two)

mcmeeshi
A journal collage from Peace Corps materials by Michelle

Here we are with less than a month left to before departure! This past week we have been happily inundated with Peace Corps e-mails about our flights, staging in Atlanta, initial safety training, pre-service training schedule, and phone meetings with our program officers. We will officially be flying to staging on March 12 then heading to Jamaica early March 14. As many of you know, our journey toward this upcoming departure to Jamaica in March has been a long one and since I (Michelle) have not had “official employment” for several months, I’ve had lots of time to browse current PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) blogs. I thought I would take this space to share some of my favorites for those of you interested in what our lives might look like these next couple years. Keep in mind that the one piece of advice we’ve heard more than anything is that each volunteer’s community, project, and experience is completely unique:

PC Volunteers ’06/’07

Tight pants– Curious what we’re supposed to bring to Jamaica? Advice from former volunteers about packing.

Continue reading “Jamaica: Second Hand (Part Two)” →

* Life Updates, * Michelle Thoughts, * Peace Corps, Videos

Peace Corps Invite!!!!!!!!!

simplyintentional

This is what WE (and many of YOU) have all been waiting for! 13 months after applying and even a few weeks after we were originally supposed to depart, we received our Peace Corps invitation. Even though we’ve known it was coming for the past week, it arrived at the door- not the mailbox- so it was definitely a suprise. We had also been clued in to the general region where we’d likely be placed (although we were warned that the program had not made it through final approval yet- and with all the budget cuts going on, we tried not to get our hopes up), but the country we’re assigned was also surprising! Since we’ve been doing a lot of house-sitting lately, the invite came to my (Michelle’s) parents’ house while Jedd was still in Portland for work so that’s why you’ll see Jedd on Skype in the video.  You’ll just have to watch it to see where we’re going to end up…

For more key points along our Peace Corps journey, from application stages to moving in to our Jamaican home (including more videos), see: Our Peace Corps Process.