Swearing In (Time for a little catch up)

August 14, 2011 by Mary O 2 Comments

On Friday, August 5, me and 25 other trainees swore in and officially became volunteers.  The two programs were Community and Organizational Development (COD) and my program, ARBD.  We had completed 8 weeks of training; I think I heard one person say 140 hours of language training in total plus other technical trainings.  We will have 2 more weeks of training at the end of September.  The other 27 volunteers in the English Education and Health Education programs will swear in this coming Wednesday.

Friday was a long day, it began at 8:30, when a private rutiea came and picked up each member of our village from their host family with all their luggage.  I was the second stop; I sadly had accumulated a whole new bag of stuff just in my 2 months of training.  Most of it was paperwork and random things Peace Corps gave to each volunteer (i.e. Medical kit, fire extinguisher, smoke detector and Brita filter).  Our village arrived in Chișinău and got all our luggage unloaded by 9:45, we then had till 11:15 to hang out before the ceremony started.  After the ceremony that lasted about 1 ½ there was a reception with all sorts of wonderful pastries and fruit.  My new host family was there, talked to them a bit and realized they know the director (principal in the US) at the school we had done our training at.  Small world.  We then had a two-hour host family conference where medical, admin and safety talked to our families about some important stuff they needed to know.  After we were done everyone started to leave with his or her respected family.  I heard and saw pictures about other volunteers getting flat tires or other car issues along the way, I was luckily not included in that group.  We stopped in Bălți (the second largest city in Moldova) and picked up some groceries then went to my new home.  We arrived at around 8:30, had a small dinner and then went to bed.

Everyone still getting situated with our new pins

I didn’t manage to take any of my own photos, so whoever I took these from on Facebook, thank you!  Congrats M26 Volunteers!