Language Skills

The Peace Corps doesn't require anyone to have any prior knowledge of a foreign language. For language skills on the application, I informed them of the following:

• I took two years of high school French.
• I speak a teeny hint of Bulgarian.

Geographic Preferences

On the application, I get to pick which regions in which I would be interested in serving. Below are the regions I picked, in no particular order:

• Asia
• North Africa / Middle East
• Eastern Europe / Central Asia
• Latin America

The regions I did not select as an interest to me were:

• Africa
• Pacific Islands
• Caribbean

Job Preferences

Listed in order are the three areas that I picked as my prefered jobs as a PCV:

1. Information Technology
2. Education
3. Business

Guatemala

For the past five months, I've been fund-raising with a group of 27 or so other students from Bellarmine University to raise money for a service trip to Zacapa, Guatemala. I just got back from the trip yesterday. We spent 10 days painting murals in a hospital and handed out food, toys and clothing. While in the department of Zacapa, we visited a place called "The Dump." After getting out of the van, a person in my group told me, "This is the land that God forgot." He was so right… at least on the surface. We got to talk to some of the people that lived there and played with some of the kids and they turned out to be pretty happy people. These people were in line to get a sandwich, rice water and a couple items of clothing which is something they don't often get. As we do this, the villagers are enjoying life and having a great time. All I know is that if I only had one pair of clothes and living on zero square meals a day, I would not be chipper. These are people that westerners can really learn something from.

It was in Guatemala that I made up my mind. I'm going to join the Peace Corps.

Introduction

Welcome to my new blog. I haven't blogged in awhile simply because I never had much of a purpose. However, that has changed. Every time I look for Peace Corps information on the web, I come across blogs by volunteers or people in the process of joining the Peace Corps. I will be joining that family. Updates may be sporatic only because the whole application process can take as long as a year. I hope that you enjoy reading and feel free to email or post comments with any and all questions.