Swear-In

A quick recap of swear in: So day begins with all of us getting ready in our pagne outfits. Back during stage, our group decided to pick green as our color, so we all went out and bought green-esque pagnes and got clothes made for our ceremony.  It was fun in the morning to see all of us getting ready after nine weeks full of biking and stage-sicknesses to get fancy together. The ceremony was held at the ambassador of Burkina Faso’s house, which was very exciting, with live music and, big highlight, a huge cake.

The ceremony itself was actually a little odd. I thought swear in would have our names be called or some mentioning of the purpose of Peace Corps… you know, peace, global friendships, understanding…. something at least along those lines of swearing to fulfill the three Peace Corps goals. But! Instead, it felt like I was joining the military. We all stood up together and swore to protect our country and the constitution from our enemies and such. Weird right?

Mamourou!

Our stage- G27- Swag Stage 

Sanga PCVS with our host families

The best part of the day though was seeing our host families again! The families from my host site, Sanga, all got together and rented a car and drove up together. I wasn’t expecting to be sad that family and friends from home weren’t at the ceremony; but I couldn’t help wishing people who knew me were there to watch and share the excitement. So it felt like a quasi-substitute to know Mamourou had come up for the event.

After the ceremony it was a whirl wind of activity: Country Director for lunch, pack up stuff, dinner, out for the night, and then by 5 am people were leaving the hotel to be dropped off at site… And we were off on our own, officially Peace Corps Volunteers- PCVS. Bizarre!