The Big Wait

The way it works for receiving the formal invitation from the Peace Corps is that after we have received the phone call from the Placement Officer, we now wait for the placement package to arrive ... so we are in the waiting mode again.  The phone call from Placement came on Monday, so on Tuesday I didn't really expect the package to show up in the mail so soon.  And it didn't.  However, on Wednesday morning I began to think that the probability of the package showing up this day was pretty good.  Our mail tends to be delivered between roughly noon and 1:30pm, so just after breakfast I started mentally counting down the time.  I'm proud to admit that I checked the mailbox only twice before noon just in case the delivery happened to occur early on this day (it happens sometimes).  Nonetheless, the mail came around 12:30 and no PC package.  Bummer!  I immediately recalculated my mental count-down clock at 24 hours and went about my day.

Around 3pm, John was working outside on the deck and went down to the garage to get a tool.  When he returned, he called me from the kitchen and told me to close my eyes and to give him a big hug.  I could tell he had a large envelope tucked into his shirt and I said "NO WAY!!!".  Turns out that the package had been delivered by UPS (rather than USPS) and they had left it in our garage as the garage door had been left open (yikes, it could have been left there for days and we may not have even noticed).  Thank goodness John saw it when he did.  We quickly opened up the package and read the cover letter which opens as "Congratulations! It is with great pleasure that we invite you to begin training in South Africa for Peace Corps service."  Additional information lists the Orientation Dates as July 5-7 and Pre-Service Training as July 8 - September 2, 2011.  That's the information we have been waiting for.  Big cheers, squeals of excitement, lots of hugs, and glasses of champagne all followed.  The package includes a LOT of information and we tried to absorb as much as we could, but it was information overload (or maybe it was the champagne!).

Oh Happy Day!