Trainee no more

Well, it is official. As of September 7th,2006 I am a Peace Corps volunteer. In case you weren't paying attention, up until this point we have all of us only been trainees. Yesterday, we signed an oath. We had to swear to protect and defend the constitution, so help us God, although we were told we did not have to utter the word of the Divine Being when we got up on stage to recite it. As far as I can tell, the main difference outside of the title is that we begin to accumulate vacation days as well as monthly pay that we collect in two years at COS (Close of Service).

It was a low key ceremony. The official ceremony included only the government officials who were there to do the honors. So the 57 of us stood on a stage with: The U.S. ambassador to China and, even more notably, Christopher Hill, the assistant Secretary of State and noted diplomat who happened to be in the region and who himself was a Peace Corps volunteer thirty years ago along with the country director for the Peace Corps. The ambassador read the oath and we recited en masse and then pictures were taken. (I believe we are to receive copies).


Aftewards we had a buffet luncheon with officials from the schools we will be teaching at. Each of the three training groups put on a performance. The other two training hubs managed to retain their dignity, one of them reading a Chinese poem along with a slide show of their training and another reciting a Chinese creation myth and acting it out on stage. Our group performed a pop Chinese love ballad that had all the earmarks of corny written all over it. Nonetheless the audience loved it and I was asked afterward by the assitant dean of my college to perform for the incoming freshman next month. I offered a more tasteful alternative: I had translated Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" into Chinese (with the help of my language teacher) and performed it at the end of our language class, and so will try to get away with that. I should say that volunteers are often asked to sing and perform and it becomes quite a source of irritation because, well, many are not comfortable doing so and it seems especially inappropriate in a classroom setting. But when in Chengdu. . .

After the performance, speeches and lunch we were off. It was strange to think that I will see very little of the people I spent the last two months less. We have an official training session in mid-January for a few weeks between semesters and a summer project. But that's about it.

I'm not good at good-byes so except for one other volunteer who as become a good friend and ho I will definitely visit in Chongqing I snuck out of the room wishing everyone well on their journey.