I have safely arrived to the Staging hotel in Philadelphia (room 542 if you are nearby!) I don’t have anything scheduled until tomorrow at noon. From there, the schedule is head spinning! The staging event will last for 7 hours tomorrow afternoon. Presumably there will be free time in the evening to get to know my new colleagues and friends.

At 8am on Saturday we all board a bus that will take us to NYC where we will fly out of JFK in the late afternoon. After a 7 hour layover in Istanbul, we will arrive to Bishkek Kyrgyzstan at 2am on Monday morning.

Again, busses will pick us up and take up about 10 miles outside of town to our orientation hotel. Orientation will start later on Monday morning after a 9am breakfast (so when are we supposed to recover from jet lag?) Monday and Tuesday are sunrise to sunset orientation. On Wednesday we meet our host families and go to our new homes. Thursday begins the formal PreService Training which runs daily from 830am-5pm for 11 weeks.

I am so excited I can hardly stand it!

Door open, one foot in…

JM