Wednesday, September 20, 2017

End of PST

Pre-Service Training finally ends!

We've spent nearly 9 weeks, training for our posting to rural Cambodia.  No one will tell you that it was easy, in fact, it was pretty intense.  Lots and lots of language training (more than 150 hours!), and still we feel like babies when left to communicate with the local people. For the most part, we can communicate, often with hands and body language when the words evade, but communicate we do!

We also learned a fair bit about Cambodian history and culture.  This lets us integrate more smoothly, but a lot of the time, it simply lets us beware of how much integration there is to be done.


Swearing In

September 15, 2017 - This was the date of our official swearing in as Peace Corps Volunteers.  Until then, we were only Peace Corps Trainees, but now we're official.


This is our cohort of 71 new Peace Corps Volunteers.  Some 34 are ETTT (English Teacher and Teacher Trainer) and 37 CHE (Community Health Education) [Peace Corps loves acronyms!]



We were personally greeted by Mr. Im Koch, Secretary of State, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, Cambodia.  A great honor indeed.


Arriving at our new home

After around 4 hours drive from the swearing in ceremony in Phnom Penh, we arrived at our new home in rural Siem Reap Province.  


This is the family we'll live with for the next 2 years - father & mother, mother's youngest sister (one of 11!), the [grand] mother and little nephew.

and now, the adventure truly begins!

1 comment:

  1. Que buena foto de grupo y vosotros en medio. Dentro de nada el camboyano será otra lengua más para vosotros.
    Un abrazo

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