Leaving for Peace Corps Service: The Pre-Departure Rundown

Hi everyone! Welcome to my very first Peace Corps update! Currently, I am writing from Washington D.C. before leaving later today to serve as an Environmental Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal.

After extensive medical and legal clearances, online onboarding, three zoom calls throughout the summer, and pre-departure Staging in D.C., I am finally about to leave on this two year adventure. Myself and many of my fellow volunteers, have been feeling both nervous and excited leading up to this moment (“nervcited” was the term used to describe it this weekend at Staging), but it is comforting to know that we are joining a long legacy of Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) in Senegal. The Peace Corps has been invited to collaborate with Senegalese people on a variety of development projects since 1963, and my group of Environment and Agriculture volunteers is the 57th group to serve there as well as the third returning there post-pandemic.

This weekend at staging, my cohort of volunteers all met in person for the first time, and have been briefed on expectations for our service before leaving for three months of pre-service training in country. Much of what we discussed has tied back to the Peace Corp’s central goals of promoting world peace through friendship and understanding of another culture, acting as a grassroots-level (mini, if you will) ambassador, and strategies for building resilience throughout our adjustment to life in another country. Once our group arrives in Senegal on Monday, September 25, we will become Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs), where we will have intensive language, culture, and field training. Then, assuming all goes well, we will be sworn in officially as Peace Corps Volunteers on December 8, 2023.

Making rounds to say my goodbyes in the months leading up to this moment has also been bittersweet, but knowing I have so much support going into this from friends and family has made me grateful for the love that makes saying goodbye so hard. And, despite the pre-departure emotional roller coaster, I feel overall good.

Serving in the Peace Corps has been something I’ve thought about for years. Growing up, I had always heard stories of the Peace Corps from my dad who was a PCV in Honduras and later an Associate Peace Corps Director in Albania with my mom. A close high school friend also reminded me recently that I have been talking about serving in the Peace Corps since we were 14. Many trusted mentor figures throughout my life have, funnily enough, served in the Peace Corps, so their influence and wisdom has undoubtedly helped guide me to this point. And additionally, I’ve had many a serendipitous run-ins that seem to be good omens for my service leading up to my departure. On Friday as I was traveling to Washington, one of the gate agents helping me check in was from Senegal and was so excited that I was going to live there. Then, on my flight to D.C., the woman sitting next to me told me her son had been a PCV in Romania and now works in the State Department. He loved his experience and it was one that was deeply formative for him.

Those that know me well know that my decision to serve in the Peace Corps was one that I reflected on significantly leading up to this moment. I am going in with the expectation that it will be both a challenging and rewarding learning experience. There will be points when I might get sick, experience loneliness, or miss home. It’s also possible that my projects might not go as planned, and in that case a flexible mindset and realistic expectations about my capabilities and limitations as PCV (as well as creative problem solving) will be important to remember. At the same time, however, I also know that I am going to meet so many amazing people, both fellow PCVs and people throughout Senegal in my village or elsewhere. Those relationships, as well as the support from home (like the people that managed to read all the way to the end of this long update), will be the things that make the highs of my service outweigh the lows.

So, if you got this far in my first blog post, thank you! My goal is to post a monthly update throughout my service with the occasional bonus post in order to make this a resources for future PCVs in Senegal. For now, I’ll leave it at that, but if you’d like to stay up to date on how I’m doing, feel free to sign up for notifications when I post at the bottom of the home page on the site.

All my best,

Maggie