Finally living our dream!

Hello everyone! Welcome to our blog, you can thank Jordan for our creative title ;)

Just wanted to give a short update as a first post! Jordan and I officially leave for our staging event on June 6th at 7:30am for D.C. We are there for roughly a day-and-a-half, and then fly with the other 71 volunteers (wow! big group!) to Accra, the capitol of Ghana. We are there for approximately 10 weeks of Pre-Service Training consisting of Language, Cross-Cultural, Job, and Health and Safety Training. From there (assuming we pass and are sworn-in as official Peace Corps Volunteers) we will move to our designated site (chosen near the end of PST) where we will be for 2 years.

If you are still interested in more information, check out the Peace Corps - Ghana website: http://ghana.peacecorps.gov/

It's funny to me how things work out, sometimes how you expected them to, and sometimes entirely different than your expectations. When we had originally been nominated for service in the Caribbean, we were thrilled! When that fell through and we were then (after a couple of up-and-down weeks) nominated for Sub-Saharan Africa, we were feeling a little unsure. When we were invited to serve in Ghana in early March, however, we were pretty excited to say yes! We are, from here on out, going to enter into this whole experience with an open mind. The fun thing is that either way, no matter where we are sent or what we are doing, we are finally living out our dream! When I was cleaning the other day and saw a newspaper article during homecoming where I was quoted for my future plans after graduation from NDSU, I said that I was going to backpack in Europe (check), go to grad school (check) and join the Peace Corps with my husband...check! So again, funny how things work our exactly how you planned, or didn't plan them...

To leave you with a final quote (for those of you that are maybe a little nervous, and rightly so, about Jordan and I moving to and living in rural Africa for 2+ years...don't worry, I'm a little nervous too, so this quote is to help calm my nerves as well!) that I saw on the Peace Corps Ghana webpage: "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. Nor do the children of men (*and women - correction SPW) as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller

Welcome to our daring adventure!!!

Love Sarah and Jordan