That Cultural Exchange Thing

I mentioned briefly in my last post that I'm a participant in Coverdell World Wise Schools. Through this program, I'm matched with a classroom in the States and we can correspond as we wish, sharing pictures and stories. Hopefully, this results in students at home learning about a new culture along with their volunteers.

When I got a packet of letters from students in my World Wise Schools match, I was really impressed to see how much thought they had put into the questions they asked me and what they wanted to know about the Philippines and Philippine culture. Their questions were more intelligent and thoughtful than some of the questions I field from adults more than twice their age and experience.

I spent the afternoon answering the questions which recurred most often throughout the letters I received, and some questions I thought were really important. I couldn't answer them all, but I got to almost 20 of them and it occurred to me that some of the questions and answers deserved to be posted here. So, here are some questions from middle school students in New Jersey, and my humble answers to them. Warning: this is gonna be a long one, folks.

How can ordinary teenagers make a difference in the world?

Making a difference starts in your own community. The world is big and there are problems at your doorstep as well as half a world away. I wish I had done more volunteering closer to home, since I believe that volunteering in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter makes a greater direct, immediate impact on those in need at home than Peace Corps does abroad. There are many volunteer opportunities available if you just look: Habitat for Humanity, SPCA, 4H, various other community volunteer organizations designed for young people like the YES program, and, when you’re no longer teenagers, Americorps or Teach for America. You can also do adopt-a-highway programs, arrange a litter clean up, or try to start composting and organic farming or gardening. If there are causes you care about like fundraising for diabetes, cancer, HIV/AIDS or autism, there are opportunities for that as well. With time, energy and care, you can contribute to the wellbeing of your community in far greater ways than you can probably imagine.

Are you a better person for joining the Peace Corps?

Absolutely not! I am trying to become a more patient person, a more compassionate person, more understanding and more empathetic. Living in a different culture provides me opportunities to become better in those ways, but I have to work on it myself. However, I think the root of this question does not lie in what we are trying to develop within ourselves, but in buying into the essential nobility of joining the Peace Corps, which is a grave fallacy. We who join Peace Corps do have altruistic reasons for joining, but our reasons are not all selfless either. Of course there will be the people who say “I just want to help people!” Frankly, they're lying. As you can see from my answer about making a difference, you don’t have to go far to help people. Some volunteers want professional experience, some want to travel no matter where, some want high adventure, some want a totally different experience than most of their peers. My foremost reason for joining the Peace Corps was to be involved in something positive for the world, to put good karma into the ether in any way that I could help. I wanted to do HIV/AIDS education work, which I haven’t had a chance to do yet, and I wanted to provide individual attention to students who may struggle in English class. But I also wanted the teaching experience, I wanted to learn about a new culture, I wanted to experience completely new things, I wanted to travel, and I’m not ashamed of that. No Peace Corps Volunteer is any better a person than the volunteers and community organizers who devote their time to making the world a better place from home.

Did you want to be placed in the Philippines?

The Peace Corps has an extremely long, tedious and difficult application process which is too boring to explain. To put it simply: you don’t get to request where you will go. You may put in geographical preferences, like Eastern Europe or Latin America, and you can put where you don’t want to go, but because of your skills set, which determines what job sector you’re qualified for, and your medical needs, which determines which countries you can or cannot be sent to, you are never guaranteed anything as far as your geographical preference. They may even put you exactly where you didn’t want to go, but this shouldn’t be a deterrent. My father served in the Peace Corps during the Vietnam war, and he wanted to go to French-speaking Africa, and he didn’t want to go anywhere near the war. Well, they sent him to Thailand, right next to Vietnam, and he had the time of his life.

Personally, I wanted to go to Thailand because it’s part of my heritage and I speak Thai. Turns out, this is exactly why I was barred from ever going to Thailand with the Peace Corps. They want their volunteers to experience a totally new culture. Once I knew this, I put as my preference, like my father before me, Francophone West Africa. The Peace Corps was recruiting for French speakers, they were excited about my desire to serve in Africa, which is where the fewest people want to go, and I was nominated for a program in Francophone West Africa. However, during my long medical screening process, I found out that I’m unable to eat gluten (a protein found in wheat, barley and rye), and I could not go to West Africa as a result. Peace Corps decided to send me to Southeast Asia, reminding me that it wouldn’t be Thailand, and in the end I was extremely happy to come to the Philippines.

What do you miss about America?

Of course I miss my friends and family. 27 months is a long time to be apart from them. I’m missing out on weddings, funerals, births, many crucial moments in the lives of my loved ones because I made the decision to be here. I knew that at the outset, of course, but faced with the reality of missing these moments, these people, it’s much harder to shrug off the time factor.

The other big thing I miss is food. Since I’m gluten intolerant, it’s not always easy for me to eat here, though of course not as difficult as it would be in other parts of the world. Filipinos have been very much influenced by 400 years of Spanish rule and 50 years of US occupation. That means that they use many Western ingredients that I can’t have, and because of the threat of contamination, it’s even harder for me. If something I am able to eat, like a fried fish, is touching a breaded piece of pork, or was fried in oil that previously fried something battered by flour, then I can’t eat it. I have been able to remain healthy here, but only through vigilance and discipline and culinary abstinence. So I miss the food I can get easily at home: gluten-free breads, cereals and desserts; peanut butter; Thai food; sushi; candy, chips and junk food.

Do you speak a foreign language? Do you speak Filipino?

Any foreign language? I grew up speaking both English and Thai in my house, and I spent about five years studying French in middle and high school.

There are hundreds of languages and dialects in the Philippines. English and Filipino, which is actually Tagalog, are listed as official languages. When my group of volunteers, Philippines batch 267, got here, we were split into three geographical and linguistic groups which would determine where our permanent sites would ultimately be. My group was sent to Dumaguete on Negros Oriental, part of the Visayas (Vi-SY-ahs). For three months, we spent intensive classtime learning Cebuano, or Visaya, or Bisaya. Cebuano has 20 million native speakers throughout the Visayan islands and greater Philippines, whereas Tagalog has 11 million.

Because the Philippines has such a high rate of moderate English proficiency, it is possible to get by without learning a Filipino language very well. Some volunteers never speak it at all. As a teacher, I am obligated to speak English all day at work, so learning is especially difficult for English Education volunteers because they aren’t as immersed in the language as volunteers in other sectors in the Philippines, coastal resource management (CRM) and children, youth and families (CYF).

What do you do in your spare time?

I read a lot of books. I have been here for almost eight months now, and I am currently reading my 23rd book since arriving in country. This is more than I’ve read for pleasure since I was in middle school myself. It’s very satisfying to have the time to read what you want, for whatever reason you want. I also use the internet a lot, and I try to spend time writing. Some weekends, I visit other volunteers relatively close to me.

Do the Philippines have seasons?

The Philippines have basically two seasons: ting-uwan (rainy season) and ting-init (hot season). It is both rainy and hot during both seasons, but the intensity of the rain during ting-uwan is shocking, as is the intensity of the heat during ting-init.

Over the course of the year, there are other mga ting (seasons), like ting-ani (harvest season), ting-prutas (fruit season), ting-bagyo (typhoon season), ting-mangga (mango season), and so on and so forth. Anyting goes. We have a joke among the Peace Corps volunteers: we’ll add the word ting before anything. It’s always ting-uncomfortable, we’ll say of the weather. It’s ting-ako na (season of me, now).

What kinds of sports and music are popular in the Philippines?

Basketball is a big, big past time here. If there isn’t a decent basketball court in every neighborhood, there’s at least a makeshift one. There are informal games all the time, and plenty of people from the neighborhood or community will come to watch. My host brother would turn the TV to a sports channel and watch basketball, past games and present, all day, and then watch shows about basketball players. Philippines national obsession. With the emergence of Manny Pacquiao, Filipino boxing legend and recent defeater of Oscar De La Hoya, boxing has gained popularity.

Filipinos love all kinds of music, without irony. Celine Dion, Queen, Mariah Carey, the Star Wars theme, Christmas music no matter the ting, the Carpenters, stadium evangelical gospel, anything. Videoke (karaoke with moving pictures of anything you can think of on the screen) is another national obsession, and you can hear it all the time. My students particularly enjoy current American hip-hop, and it can be heard at all times, and they frequently prepare dance numbers to it.

What is Filipino food like? Do you like it?

Filipinos eat white rice at every meal, even breakfast. For some volunteers, this is a big adjustment and sometimes one which they will never get used to or come to enjoy. Personally, because I am used to eating rice regularly and because I can’t eat common items like bread or flour, I really prefer to eat rice anyway, so it’s not a problem for me. Filipino main dishes are usually fried or boiled, they often contain a lot of fish and pork, and their main seasonings are salt and soy sauce. Because soy sauce contains gluten, sometimes my host families had trouble finding things to make for me. However, with a little imagination, they were able to remove the soy sauce or substitute it with something safe for me. I like many Filipino foods, but because of my dietary restrictions I am often limited in what I can have and how it can be flavored, resulting in the same kinds of bland dishes over and over. Now that I live on my own, I can make my own food, and generally I wouldn’t describe it as Filipino. I am, however, very much into eating and making Filipino desserts.

A Note on Serving in the Peace Corps as a Volunteer of Color

The volunteer of color faces a unique set of challenges in the Peace Corps. He or she faces stereotypes and misconceptions both virulent and baffling; he or she must constantly defend his or her credibility as an American, or, indeed, the very fact that he or she is an American; he or she might not receive much in the way of support or understanding from his or her fellow PCVs who are white. I knew all of this at the outset of my application process; frankly, I knew this not about just the Peace Corps but about life in general. Those aforementioned challenges are not and were not new to me, but I knew they would take on a new context when I chose to serve, and I knew it would become part of my job to try to dispel stereotypes and misconceptions of people of color from the US at my post.

I believe my experience in the Philippines has been fairly light in terms of how my racial identity is perceived, especially in comparison to other minorities or people of color serving in other Peace Corps countries. As a mixed person whose ethnicity is ambiguous, I have been able to blend in insofar as people don’t stare at me much; if they do, they’re figuring out something about my face, something they can’t place. Many have mistaken me for mestiza – half Filipino, half white – which is pretty much as close as anyone has ever guessed for my ethnicity. Marketplace anonymity is, of course, shattered when I speak English, or, more accurately, when I can’t speak or understand Cebuano. I lead a life without being hassled overmuch, which I appreciate. When I am walking with Connie or Cassie or Sean, I can say I am decidedly more uncomfortable. People stare, people say things that we consider rude, people generally think they have a right to your person that they do not, and that’s just to the white people. When I am with them, I feel like I am being judged harshly for keeping their company, much like the Filipinas who take up with fat old white men are judged in Dumaguete. And then, in the context of being introduced or being involved in a social gathering, the white volunteers are much more celebrated, while I am given only a cursory nod or sometimes ignored altogether, despite the fact that I am here in the exact same capacity as they are. This has made my companions possibly more uncomfortable than me, for which I give them sensitivity credits. But ultimately, I don’t spend much time with them at all, and the things I face without white accompaniment are more prevalent and more sigh-inducing.

Those things: being asked where I’m from, despite saying “The United States” already. Being told I look Indian or that I must be Indian or from India. In one particular case, one woman telling me that I was actually not what I said I was, but Latina. Being told I am not a pure American especially rankles.

Here’s the secret though: I have been told all these things since I was a very, very small child. Ignorant people in the United States had made growing up brown in whiteland a very difficult thing for a long time. If I am inwardly irritated by such comments or penetrating questions about my ethnicity, it’s not because Filipinos are saying them to me. It’s because I’ve been fielding such comments for over twenty years, and, indeed, in the States I navigated much more negative comments, comments designed specifically to hurt me or stated by those oblivious to how such comments punched me in the chest. I have been called every racial slur you can think of (ambiguous ethnicity not conducive to finding the proper insult), I have been the subject of racial bullying, I have been the victim of racial discrimination. But these are obvious forms of racism. Much worse, I think, are people who don’t think what they do is racist, or how institutions and practices and much of all Western society are permeated with racism. It’s easy to say “don’t you dare call me the N-word.” It’s much more difficult to explain to someone why you don’t appreciate being called “the perfect Asian student” or that people of color have the right to be called what they choose, and not what white people ascribe to them.

I believe that in coming to the Philippines, I got off light. Though it is sometimes wearying, having to tell people that I am indeed American and not Indian, not even Indian American (or American Indian, in fact), is not a terrible burden to bear. And when faced with the bald statement that I’m not pure American, I try to keep my irritation on the inside and explain that anyone born in the United States is a pure American, that people can become naturalized citizens and are also pure Americans, and that white people more than anyone else in the United States were long ago (or sometimes not so long ago) immigrants themselves, from Europe. There are, in fact, groups Filipino Americans in Louisiana who came before the turn of the 19th century, thereby making them 10th or 11th generation Americans, which is more than many of the white Americans that currently populate the US can boast, since many of them came a hundred years later. I know that some people think my “Americanness” is legitimized by my having a white father, but that is tempered by having a Thai mother; she makes me “not American.” I do not like that my white side gives me credibility, and I do not like that my Thai side is dismissed as being unacceptably not American. I want to be taken and appreciated (or reviled, if that’s how it’s going to be) for my own merits. I suppose this is the ongoing project of any person of color having to navigate the labyrinth of white privilege and racism.

I don’t know how volunteers of color in other places, namely Eastern Europe and Central Asia, do it. I was very close to being sent there, and I like to think that I could have persevered through difficult times, but it seems like it would be so difficult as to be almost unbearable. Syd tells me some of her companions in Armenia left early because of how difficult it was to be volunteers of color there. Here, I am not called names. I am not in danger. I lead a comfortable life of some anonymity. Could be worse things for a brown girl in the Peace Corps.

We can, we can make a difference

I woke up today a Peace Corps Volunteer.



We finally swore in after these long, difficult three months. And now we're parting ways for our respective permanent sites.

One thing that was amazing to experience this past week was watching President-Elect Obama get on stage at Grant Park. The mood here, at the conference, was overwhelming joy. We must have a unique experience; we are likely the only Peace Corps batch all together for the occasion. I cannot articulate the depth of my joy, so all I will say is "Yes, we did." And so we will continue to do.

Goodbye Dumaguete, I've got to go

One year ago today I was nominated for a June departure to Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa. I have come through so much to be where I am today: a week away from swearing as a Peace Corps volunteer with the 267th batch of volunteers in the Philippines. I feel like my personal strides have mirrored my Peace Corps progress somehow. I was diagnosed with this autoimmune disease just as I was sending in my medical kit in December, and as I struggled to navigate and control my emotions around such a difficult diagnosis, a lifelong ailment that I could only control through strict dietary discipline, I struggled too to prove I was medically fit to join Peace Corps, that my mind was strong enough to overcome the failures of my broken body and strive regardless of my physical shortcomings. I had to prove to myself and to the Peace Corps that I could take care of my own health without faltering, and I finally grew more comfortable and less angry with my fate as a gluten intolerant just as I achieved medical clearance. Medical clearance came at about the same time I was awarded the Portia Dunham award in fiction from my university. I had to mount a crusade against a Peace Corps placement which would have insured my failure just as I was coming into the final assignments of my senior year, and I was placed to my immune system’s satisfaction, here in the Philippines, about the same time that I graduated. I was coming out the victor in everything I had striven so hard for: Peace Corps, my health, my fiction, my degree. And while I’ve been training here, I have been able to overcome despair, bitterness and frustration from many sides, such that I barely remember the sensation of having to force myself through to the next moment without losing control of my motivation, my emotions, my body, my hopes. Some days I can’t fathom how long the next two years in Leyte will be, but today is a big day for me. It’s a year of having been in the application process and training and coming out triumphant at every turn. It’s a year of personal gain and growth and healing. It’s a year where I’ve felt intense motivation for the work I’ve chosen in fiction. I breathe: mind over matter.

In non-overarching metaphor news, I achieved a score of intermediate-mid on my Language Proficiency Interview. There are three sections, novice, intermediate, advanced, and within each there are three tiers, low, mid, high. Beyond that there is superior, which they really don’t award people, and then native speaker. A few people in Dumaguete achieved intermediate-high and two people achieved advanced-low. I’m very pleased with my score, with the scores of all of those in my cluster, and we’ve made our teacher proud, which I consider possibly the most important thing. Maybe I’ll never get much better than that because of the nature of my job and the Philippines, but this is tangible evidence of something I worked for during training. This is the fruit of the four hours per day I spent in class and the countless hours of homework and study I did outside of class.

So this is it for those of us who came to Dumaguete and weren’t assigned here. Early tomorrow morning we’ll leave for a conference in Bacolod, swear in as volunteers on the 7th, and head into this two year experience we’ve been waiting so impatiently for. Here now, a pictoral ode to my cluster, training and Dumaguete.

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Lechon. It's just not a party without one.

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The awesome Bantayan cluster. That's Sean, May, our teacher, Syd, me, Spiderman (or Denzel, Jessica's host nephew, who can't resist a picture), Dan and Sheryll. Bringing up the attractiveness statistics of Peace Corps volunteers everywhere.

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Lynn of the Casa Miani group, presenting something I only wish I could eat, yesterday at the handog.

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The cathedral. Built in 1754, the oldest and tallest Spanish church on Negros



old-timey firetruck



Happy Fred's on the Boulevard. I never went because it's always full of tambok og puting nga mga lalaki, but the name made me think of my grandpa. Hi Grandpa!

Reflections on Teaching in Dumaguete

All of us in Dumaguete have really been feeling the burn of training over the past few (grueling) weeks. Turns out Peace Corps Philippines has one of the world’s longest pre-service training periods, and this is a fairly new development. Why they would want exhausted and increasingly disgruntled trainees is beyond me, but the pressure should ease fairly soon as training winds down and we prepare for the big move.

My students and I have just recently begun to have a freer relationship with each other. Despite the rocky start in technical training and during practicum, I’ve been able to have a positive experience lately and I can almost let myself believe that I may have reached some students in some way, even if it wasn’t in “learning English.” I don’t really think I could have made a true difference in language with them in so short a time, but I received some notes from students my last two days with them that were really appreciative of a few of my techniques. It was gratifying to know that I hadn’t employed the ideas I’d had in vain and that students could gain from those ideas. I hope that they can take with them the knowledge that a teacher can and will give you patient, individual attention and that questions will be met with care and thought.

One of the goals of Peace Corps is that through our work, we can dispel some stereotypes of Americans and people from our communities can understand Americans better. This is not, in my opinion the most important of Peace Corps’ goals, but it’s one I face as a person of color. Of course one of the stereotypes of Americans is that we are all white. While I’ve been teaching here in Dumaguete, no student has asked me my ethnicity or put me on the defensive about my nationality the way adults have. I don’t know how it will be in Hilongos, but that has been something I’ve really appreciated. Maybe another thing these students can take from my time with them is that not all Americans are white and we are still legitimate Americans. From talking with other Asian-American volunteers, I know that no matter how long I stay here, I will still face confusion and even rejection on a racial level, but I’m heartened by these students’ reaction to me and cautiously hopeful that my students in Hilongos will be similar. If not, I can spend the next two years proving my legitimacy. My American street cred.

I wish I’d had my camera on me on Thursday, but my batteries were dead. At the end of my second class, the students put on a despedida, a farewell show, for me, and it was really touching that they’d do all this work and put on a whole show for me, complete with guitars, drums, karaoke machine. Of course I’ve already mentioned how musical a people the Filipinos are, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised when they sang nine songs, two in Cebuano, and did two dances. The nature of dancing here has not been something I’ve written about yet because I didn’t quite know how. Basically, at any kind of celebration, any at all, there will be many dances, and they’re very dirty. The dancers could be the most conservative people you know in a conservative country, but a dance comes on and they’re gyrating and undulating and rubbing on each other and being generally very scandalous. This happens in school, church, wherever. I’m not kidding. So that was the first dance they danced for me. The second dance, called “Papaya,” is absolutely the opposite, a kind of dance remniscient of the white man shuffle as immortalized in the fine Will Smith feature Hitch. You just point with your fingers to the left, to the right, up, down and then shake them a little bit. I suspect rhythmless, non-Filipino influence for this particular travesty, and of course it was the only dance fit for me, a rhythmless non-Filipino, to be cajoled into performing. So they dragged me up there, and with two much more talented students flanking me, I did this finger pointing dance in front of forty-five other students and my co-teacher, not to mention my technical trainer, Rustum, who was there evaluating my performance as a teacher. Luckily he couldn’t have evaluated me on my dance technique because another student soon dragged him up there to join us. This would be funnier to those reading if you knew Rustum, whose most assumed pose is one where he hides half his face behind his hands and looks generally like a shy mouse. Many pictures were taken on many mobile phones and in twenty years, maybe they won’t know my name or what I taught them about metaphors, but they’ll remember how I managed to butcher even the Papaya dance.

Yesterday I was supposed to teach at Negros Oriental National High School for the last time, but there was some confusion as to whether or not class was actually happening, so I spent my two class periods just hanging around my students. I got one more mini despidida in each class and gave out the pasalubong (thinking of you gifts, generally food) I’d brought them. I have been surprised at how well they seem to have enjoyed my time with them, surprised and gratified, and I am optimistic about my future as a teacher in a way I couldn’t be when I first started this venture. Teaching is a performance, it’s the smile you put on and energy you put out even when you don’t think you have it in you, every single day, every single class period. And the reward you get is the respect and esteem of your colleagues and students, and if you’re very lucky, the knowledge that you helped someone in some small way in the process.

It has only been in the past two weeks that I’ve grown more comfortable and confident inhabiting the role of teacher. Only that recently have I been feeling less like I’m going to melt in front of the class from nerves and more like I’m prepared to give my lesson and elicit positive responses. The nature of practicum is that we are not stable forces in the classroom, so I have always felt that what we give the students, and indeed, the teachers we’re paired with, is not exactly a fair amount of time and energy. We are spread so thinly between our myriad tasks that the students don’t necessarily receive the focus they deserve, and for that I feel like I’ve let them down. I’m moving on to Hilongos just when I’ve finally begun to build a rapport with these students, just in time to feel like I’m leaving them dangling. I feel beholden to them, yet there’s nothing I can do to ease that, and there was never going to be. I was always going to leave Negros Oriental National High School in late October and Dumaguete in November.

Do I still have apprehension about teaching in general? Of course. Am I nervous about starting from scratch with 240 new students come November? Only when I’m breathing. Am I up for the challenge? Always.



a cappella



Less than a quarter of my first class, in a classroom that isn't ours. I love disorganization and miscommunication.



Peace: the most popular Filipino photo pose



Some of my students and me, my last day

The Obligatory Introduction

It's been a long road frought with peril and bureaucracy, but I'm finally here. On May 29th, I received my invitation to join the 267th group of Peace Corps volunteers in the Philippines, leaving on August 13th. I am both anxious and excited, and I know that this will impact my life in ways I can't yet anticipate. I am very much looking forward to meeting my fellow 267ers, my students, my co-workers, the people of the community in which I'm placed and anyone else who might cross my path. My life is gaining momentum.

Here is an overview of my journey to the Peace Corps:

My father is an RPCV who served two tours in Thailand in the early to mid 1970s. For my entire life, I have known what the Peace Corps does and how drastically it changed almost everything about him for the positive. During college and especially during my own application process, I came to realize how much his time in Thailand, which lasted much longer than his service, has meant to him. I began to consider joining during my junior year in college, which I spent in Scotland being ecstatic and frolicking over every available surface. 

My father always said, "I wanted to see the world, and I didn't want to pay for it." The benefits of the Peace Corps, which are certainly not limited to the professional and financial, were too wonderful for me to pass up. In the Peace Corps, I could see parts of the world I'd never imagined, become a better version of myself, experience a completely different life, develop valuable skills, meet incredible people and maybe even contribute to society if I'm very lucky. So, in mid-October 2007, I began the application process. 

On Halloween, I had an interview with my recruiter, who would become my strongest supporter and for whom I have a lot of appreciation and admiration. On November 1st, she nominated me for my first choice location, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, leaving June 2008. I was very happy. I got my medical kit in during the third week of December, mere days before I would be diagnosed with gluten intolerance by a gastroenterologist. Though devastating, this diagnosis would explain debilitating symptoms which had disrupted my life since the summer I was fifteen. Unluckily for me, my medical kit did not read "gluten intolerance" but "IBS." On December 27th, I was told I could not join the Peace Corps with "IBS," but since I suddenly had a name for my actual medical issue, I was determined to go forward. I wrote an appealing letter, including my new medical evidence, and received a call from my screening nurse, who said she would reopen consideration of my case once the efficacy of my new diet was reevaluated in March.

At the end of March, I was officially diagnosed with gluten intolerance and my doctor sent my screening nurse the latest medical evaluations and a letter stating his confidence in my ability to serve in the Peace Corps. I got another call from my screening nurse saying I was cleared on gluten intolerance, but now she had to go over the rest of my medical kit, which had apparently not been cracked since December. I was relieved and happy, and during April, I sent in a few more labs and statements for final medical clearance. 

On May 2nd, I received the much-coveted medical clearance. I really cannot now articulate the level of my happiness, as I thought this was the end of my travails. There was a two page list of countries that could support my diet, and I was driving hard into the busy end of my senior year. About a week before graduation, I received another call, this time one that would raze my spirits and make me very, very nervous.

I realized that it was just slightly too late for my original nomination date, but that suited me just fine as I now wanted to go to the Wesleyan Writers Conference, which would have been later than my leaving date. The call I got, however, said that I could not go to Francophone Africa at all. For six months, I had anticipated time in that region and was rather unhappy about not being able to go. Then, my placement officer said she wanted to send me to the Central Asian Caucasus region. I knew nothing about these countries except that they were practically in Europe, and didn't that mean they ate exactly the food that I really, really cannot? I did some research and found out not only do they eat that food, but they sometimes revere it. Going to the Caucasus region would be tantamount to a death sentence. I would not have been able to eat much of anything, I would have had to be rude to my hosts by refusing meals, and, most likely, I would have had gluten reintroduced into my system and become ill again. I contacted my screening nurse, who assured me that any country on the gluten-free friendly list was safe, but nonetheless offered to check with country-specific medical to confirm. 

A week later, the Friday before graduation weekend, I received another call from my screening nurse saying that the Caucasus region was indeed not the best place for me. She took it off the gluten-free friendly list of countries, and now no one with my affliction will ever have to go there and be ill. I was relieved, though now I had no nomination and no idea as to where the Peace Corps might send me. 

A week and a half after that, I was still operating without news of a new nomination. I was hoping for Asia or non-Francophone Africa, but I was willing to go anywhere they wanted to send me and always had been. My father had not originally wanted to go to Thailand at all, but clearly he had a wonderful experience, and I was sure that wherever the Peace Corps decided to send me, I would be able to appreciate and enjoy that place as well. While visiting with my friend and her parents on Tuesday, May 27th, I received a call from placement asking me how I felt about Southeast Asia, teaching secondary school English, mid-August departure. Of course I was incredibly enthusiastic about both the location and the bountiful (and safe) rice that I was sure to encounter, and on Thursday, the 29th, I had that invitation to the Philippines in my hands. I probably didn't stop squealing for a solid five minutes. After looking over everything with loads of delight, I accepted my invitation the next morning. 

So, I've sent in my passport and visa paperwork. I'm now working (procrastinating) on my tailored resume and aspiration statement. I've set up this blog so I can keep people back home updated during my service. I am so excited for what I have chosen to do with this time in my life after undergrad, when the opportunities seem boundless and I have no obligation but the one where I keep myself happy and stimulated. I know I've made the right decision, and I'm so happy to have been placed in the Philippines. I could not imagine a better placement, and I can't wait for the latest adventure to start.