by Anonymous8

Created on: June 27, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

It's been nearly three years since I began the application process for Peace Corps. It happened so quickly, so suddenly, or so it seems in retrospect. When I remember it logically, I remember that the interviews and applications and essays and medical clearances took a year. But one day, stuck in the post college limbo that was made more uniquely stressful as a result of feeling as if the past 4 years of my life were spent on a path leading in a direction 180 degrees different from the one in which I wanted to go, I woke up and typed www.peacecorps.gov into the browser on my computer, and that was it. I was going.

That was the quick, sudden part - the decision. And it was made with as little real understanding of what I was deciding to do, as little real planning and preparation, as many of life's major decisions are. Like falling in love, it felt less like a decision than a delicious compulsion and also like falling in love, absent were any considerations of the challenges or difficulties that would inevitably arise along the way. This was the honeymoon, and I was entranced by the idea of life in an exotic village somewhere, becoming more entangled and infatuated the more I knew.
Ironically similar was the way in which I decided that the Air Force Academy was the only college to which I was going to apply five years earlier. To be perfectly honest, I applied to two - Haverford waitlisted me. I knew that early. And I went forward with the application process for the Air Force Academy as singlemindedly and doggedly as if my acceptance was assured and my future could proceed in no other way. It strikes me as either very conceited or really stupid that I didn't consider other options. The acceptance rate was 15%, and I wasn't valedictorian or President of my class or really very amazing in any other way.

Any story about my Peace Corps experience really begins there, in Colorado Springs, CO.

The Air Force Academy campus is nestled into the foot of the Rockies - that place where mountains become slightly rolling hills. A 15 minute walk from the dorms and you were well on your way up the trail that led to the top of Eagle's Peak. I'll never forget what it was like to walk outside on the first frigid day of winter, which in my memory is defined by the first real snowfall of the season. The mountains that towered so majestic and green the day before were suddenly white and everything felt different, promising.
God was it beautiful. Like the Florida beaches in the

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