After nine weeks of training, I’m officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. I swore in on Monday, November 9, 2009. It was a quite an event. Our training host families, community members, permanent host families, future team-teachers, principals, representatives from the Ministry of Education, Peace Corps, US Embassy, Governors and many others all came to the ceremony to show their support. The ceremony itself was short, maybe an hour or so. We had words of wisdom from those chosen to speak. It was really nice to see such support for what we are doing in Palau. My participation in the event was to give a speech in Palauan and humiliate myself by attempting to do some contemporary Palauan dance (and a hula?).
There are supposed to be pictures below, however I'm having issues uploading them from here, so they'll have to wait until I get into the capitol city next time. I’m told that it was recorded for the local cable access channel. So, I’ll see if I can’t get a copy of that somehow.
Overall, it wasn’t that bad. I guess that it is Palauan custom for the audience to get up and dance with you and give you money- I earned $22 in a matter of minutes! After the ceremony, all of the Volunteers were whisked away with their new host families and spread across the entire country of Palau. It was a bittersweet goodbye, even though we were all excited to get to our permanent sites, we knew that it’ll be an adjustment not seeing a familiar American face everyday. I was headed for the capitol city of Koror to wait a few days for the boat to take me to my new home, the small island of Angaur.
There are supposed to be pictures below, however I'm having issues uploading them from here, so they'll have to wait until I get into the capitol city next time. I’m told that it was recorded for the local cable access channel. So, I’ll see if I can’t get a copy of that somehow.
Overall, it wasn’t that bad. I guess that it is Palauan custom for the audience to get up and dance with you and give you money- I earned $22 in a matter of minutes! After the ceremony, all of the Volunteers were whisked away with their new host families and spread across the entire country of Palau. It was a bittersweet goodbye, even though we were all excited to get to our permanent sites, we knew that it’ll be an adjustment not seeing a familiar American face everyday. I was headed for the capitol city of Koror to wait a few days for the boat to take me to my new home, the small island of Angaur.
Can't wait for the pictures!
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