peace corps interview

some have been asking how my peace corps interview went on friday, though i think i might have already recounted my impressions to most of you. but for those who're interested here's a brief summary.

the long and the short of it is that we'll definitely get into peace corps (barring any medical complications). bernadette, our regional recruiter, said that she was going to start the recommendation process before we've even finished our interviewing with her. see chris's post for more detailed info on the process (or the peace corps website). in any event, she has to recommend us to national peace corps, then they call us back with an offer. when bernadette recommends us she picks a location and a type of job she thinks we'd be good at. pc national can take the recommendation by offering us something within those paramaters or they could offer us something totally different, it's their descration based on what is available. anyways, bernadette has it in her head that we would be best suited for an agricultural assignment. now if you know me and chris at all you'll know that our agricultural experience pails in comparison to our youth work and community development experience and you might be thinking we'd be more suited to that type of work. but bernadette does not really listen so well to what we want. she wants us to be "flexible" and be "open to the peace corps experience." she says that they are in dire need of people willing to do ag work and that it is extremely difficult to place couples, leading us to believe this might be the only way we'd get into pc in the next decade.

now, i think in general an agricultural assignment wouldn't be so bad if it were in africa . we'd still be in the country of our choice; we'd still be living and working in the community and learning a lot about the culture; and frankly, all povery, social inequality, etc. in developing countries are tied very closely to agriculture. so that would be cool. BUT bernadette has given us doubt that she is really listening to our desires and chris and i are sceptical that we'll get africa. so in summation, we're still going through the process with pc, but we're really going to be sure to have some other back up programs which might be more suited to our specific desires. (our couples interview is friday, november 18th--more then.)