Staging

Well, Day 1 of Staging is pretty much complete, and we board our plane for Africa tomorrow at – get this! – 2:00 AM.  Just kidding, actually we check out of the hotel and board a bus at 2 AM, then drive the 3 or so hours from Philadelphia to New York, arriving just in time for our flight 6 hours later.  Yeah, that’s right, the flight is at 11:15.  I get that they want to get us to that airport with plenty of extra time, but really, 6 hours?  Especially when it involves getting everyone up at 2 AM.  Lol jk no one’s going to bed.  Tomorrow is going to be such an interesting shitshow.  Just picture it: 55 20-somethings, each loaded down with 4 bags they can’t really balance totaling over 100 lbs, navigating an airport on no sleep (and quite likely many will be hungover).  I have faith in us, but you have to admit it’s a funny image.  As a PCV from the year before put it, “Everything from here on out is run by a hivemind of terrified 20-somethings”.  I think that sums it up nicely.

Fast forward through 15 hours on the plane, and we’ll land in Johannesburg, South Africa at 8:15 AM (that’s 2:15 in the morning back in the Eastern Time Zone).  We have a 5 hour layover in Johannesburg, and then a quick 1 hour flight, and we’ll finally land in Mozambique’s capital of Maputo at 2:55 PM (aka around 9 AM EST).  That’s assuming everything goes according to plan of course.  Really, who knows what sorts of craziness could ensue over the next 31 hours.

In other news, our staging group seems pretty excellent.  There’s 55 of us (a large group, and when we get to Mozambique there will be just over 200 of us in country).  We’re pretty evenly divided between English, Math, Chemistry, and Biology teachers, and most of us seem to fall squarely in the age range of 21-25.  I’ve met one outlier who’s 28, and we have one notable retired married couple, but everyone else seems to be a pretty recent college grad.  I’m kind of surprised honestly; I was expecting a lot more variation and a lot more married couples, based on my experience with Azerbaijan.  Apparently not.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve learned so far.  The next time I write will hopefully be from Mozambique, and I’ll have all sorts of interesting things to say.  Here’s crossing my fingers we all make it to Africa!