COS

April 28, 2009

Sorry for the hiatus…having lots to do and feeling lazy at the same time makes for a severe shortage of blogs. I am kind of glad that the ‘10 cents a day’ blog was on the top of the page for so long, though. It’s one of my favorites. So what have I been doing for the last weeks/months? Finishing up. I got to my post in August 2007 and my two years of Peace Corps service are nearing an end.

Almost the entirety of my work right now is with my Club Success’ in nearby high schools. It’s a class based on the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I wrote about it back in November when there were two. Now there are five, and with the end of school year fast approaching and a party in the works to join all of the clubs together, tying up the loose ends is keeping me quite busy. I’m really proud of the kids and I think I can already see some of the positive results. After the class is over, I plan on giving a class of the same material to adults.

Literally speaking of the end of my PC service, I attended my Close of Service (COS) conference at the end of March in the capital with all of the rest of my training group that has made it thus far. We met in Philadelphia with 39 and at COS conference we were 26. Losing a third is, I think, a little more than usual but it was still great to reunite with friends that we hadn’t seen in over a year. And we’re still hoping to meet up with some of those who left for medical or personal reasons at future reunions.

Peace Corps treated us really well putting us up in probably the nicest hotel in Yaoundé. It was on a small mountain with our rooms’ balconies overlooking the pool in the foreground and the entire capital city in the background. We also had three really nice buffet meals a day. I felt stuffed for the entire conference and at least a week after.

The conference itself consisted of doing a lot of paperwork and planning logistics for our departures – things like our plane tickets home and closing up our posts as far as things like rent and utilities (for those that have them). My biggest headache right now is doing everything I can do get Saki, my dog, home with me. I decided to take cash in lieu of my plane ticket in order to take care of all the details but it’s proving more difficult than anticipated. I’ll keep you updated. Also during the conference, we spent a day at the embassy for a question and answer session (things like people looking for fiancé visas) and to talk about career opportunities in the State Department and elsewhere.

That’s all for now. I’ll be blogging a lot more – hopefully once a week – when my workload slows down in a few days.

Tim