SWEAR IN!

After 10 weeks of waiting, cramming in information about teaching, Kenyan culture, language, host family experiences and time with each other. December 14th, 2012 came and we were sworn in as true volunteers. At that point everyone had been calling us Peace Corps trainees as is the Peace Corps tradition and the excitement of soon being called a Peace Corps Volunteer built up as we got closer and closer to our swear in date.

All the girls dressed in their finest traditional Kenyan garb that we all had made for this specific event and the boys dressed in traditional Massai clothes, Kenyan dress shirts or looking spiffy in their button ups and ties. We all piled into a bus and were taken to the ambassadors house, a beautiful house that had a big gardens surrounding the entire property with monkeys running around in the trees. When we entered the backyard we were greeted by women in grass skirts dancing while drummers played traditional Kenyan music. The air was filled with so much energy from how excited we were to be at our ceremony to the people who had helped us along the way and ready to give us our certificate as an official Peace Corps volunteer.  There was also the smell of burgers, chicken, potatoes salad, real salad, and beer in the air. Even though it had only been 10 weeks since we had anything close to a burger, or real ketchup. Just the thought of being able to eat and drink some of these delicious things got us all giddy haha

We walked around greeting people, looking around the property and of course checked out the forbidden pool which had once been a part of the ceremony but I guess in previous years PCV's had gotten to drunk and started getting to foolish around the pool lol One wonderful surprise that I got to experience was that my host Mama had surprised me the night before at my hotel saying she was going to be there for my ceremony. It was so so sweet and I was more then happy that she could be there for me. My host family and I still talk while I live in Shimoni and have planned a time when I can visit them in Machakos and a time when they can come to Mombasa.

One of my favorite parts of the ceremony was when the people who were dancing, drumming and singing called the people who were going to teach in each region (coast, central, western, eastern and turkana) to come up and dance the traditional dances from that region. As many of you know, I LOVE to dance so when they started calling us all up there to dance I couldn't have asked for a better ceremony. By the end, each and everyone one of us were up dancing as well as many of our counterparts having an absolute ball! It was so great to get a taste of the vast cultures we were all going into and just to see how much fun everyone was having and obviously getting to dance just was the cherry on the top of the cake/day or whatever you say.

During the ceremony many people such as our country director, the director of the education program, the ambassador spoke about the history of the Peace Corps, the values and goals of the Peace Corps, the impact the Peace Corps has had on Kenya and the work that we will be doing once we all moved to our different sites. My favorite speech was by 3 of my friends. Jay, Vince and Amber who thanked everyone for their help in our training and our experiences in the last 10 weeks but what was cool is that Jay signed the speech, Vince said it in English and Amber spoke in Kiswahili. It was a great representative of the many faceted experience we had during training and will have during our two years of training and showed how many cultures were being exchanged, learned about and practiced while here as Peace Corps volunteers. I looked around during those speeches and realized that I was about to leave the people that I had bonded so well with, used as support to get through some of the tough times during the first 10 weeks, laughed with during cultural confusion moments, discussed life, learning, teaching, friends, family, EVERYTHING under the sun with, had become my best friends and now we were all moving to 27 different places to do some amazing work as teachers for two years. It was a sad/happy/proud moment!

After the speeches, each of us got up with our headmasters and mistresses from the school to get our certificates. Each of our headmasters and mistresses had all come to Nairobi for a few days so that we could get to know each other, have them be there during our ceremony and then travel back to our sites together. Then after the certificate giving it was chow time!! All of us piled on the food, grabbed a few Tuskers and sat down stuffing our faces with the amazing food, contemplating on what it would be like to leave each other, what our sites were going to be like and hoping that it wasn't going to be an awkward ride with our headmasters and mistresses, seeing that most of us were going to be traveling at least 6 hours to get to our site and at most two days (that was me haha) with just our headmasters/mistresses. O and we were going to have two years worth of our lives in bags that we had lug from bus, to matatu, to tuk tuk to whatever form of transportation. If you have never been in any of these forms of transportations in Kenya, let me just say it looks a lot like in circuses when 10 clowns somehow get out of one of those tiny little cars. So with our HUGE bags getting into any of these forms of transportations is an awkward situation alone.

The ceremony was pretty spectacular and as great as I had imagined it was going to be! And Woop woop, now I'm a PEACE CORPS VULNTEER! ex-Trainee.

Thanks for reading!