Still Working Our Way Through Staging

June 19

We have completed staging, although Ginnie chose to spend a portion of her training time in the emergency room - yep, she got sick even before getting out of the country (what are the odds?)!We're both doing fine now and excited to get on the plane in the morning to fly out to Belize. One tiny snag is that Ginnie will need to get a final medical clearance before we check out at 4:30 am (yikes is it really that early!) for our 10:40am flight to Belize City.Anyway, staging was a lot of fun. We have a great class filled with people from all over the country and with many different experiences and a great age range (from 23 to 70). There are even four other married couples in this class, although they did mention that things don't typically end up that way. It has been great getting to know everyone (Ginnie has been very appreciative of everyone's support while she was sick!) and to participate in all the ice-breakers and team-builders (we played "Find Someone Who..." among others, but those who know Ginnie knows she loves these icebreakers - and this one was great because they took something from each of our applications that was unique and put it on the form so we got to know these little known things about each other in our first meeting). We also had an opportunity to express our ideas and feelings about our upcoming experience through some funny songs, dances, performances, and games. It's been a very long few days, but we're excited about finally heading out to our post. We will soon meet our new host families in Armenia, not the one in Eastern Europe :) but rather a small village south of the capitol Belmopan. We'll be updating things as often as possible, but our schedule is quite hectic for the next few weeks.