Waiting for the invitation

I added my timeline over there on the sidebar for reference.

Right now I'm just waiting for the invitation. Headquarters has notified me that I will be serving in a non-malarial country, meaning I will be going to Eastern Europe/Central Asia most likely. I'm also eligible to serve in a handful of Pacific Islands and Morocco as well. This also means that my assignment (Secondary Science Education) might change, since my assignment was made before they knew I was G6PD deficient. If it does change, I won't mind. I wasn't terribly attached to that assignment, and I wanted to do TEFL in the first place, since that could ostensibly help me work toward a degree in applied linguistics, if I end up doing that.

When will my invitation arrive? Well, like everything else with PC, it depends. If you are black, for example, then PC will try to put you in a group where there is another black person, so that you're not the only black guy in Kyrgyzstan. Same thing goes if you're gay, older, serving as a married couple, and so on. That's one thing that can complicate placement. Additionally, if you have a medical condition like I do, then your prospective countries are whittled down even more. Your placement officer has to juggle all these things before sending you away for 27 months.

I check the Yahoo! PC group, and people post their own timelines there. From what I gather, people get their invites roughly 3-6 months before departure date, which for me is around Sept./Aug. 2007. So, with any luck, I will be hearing from them as soon as March.

G6PD deficiency

The medical screening process is the one where most applicants have problems. On the various PC online communities, without a doubt the #1 type of question from applicants is medical in nature.

"Do they have tampons in Bolivia?"
"What if I was clinically depressed for three years?"
"Will the PC office care if I am fairly obese?"
"I got asthma."

I didn't think I would have a single problem with medical screening. I am a fit young man, with no history of mental problems nor any medications I have to take regularly. So it was a surprise when lab reports came back saying that I was deficient in G6PD. It might've been a lab mistake, I thought, because sometimes the blood is sensitive to being left out past a few days and not being tested. So I got retested and that confirmed that there was no mistake.

G6PD is glucose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase, which is an enzyme. It converts glucose-6-phosphate into 6-phosphoglucono-δ-lactone and is the rate-limiting enzyme of the pentose phosphate pathway. I had to learn about this shit in microbiology and I hated it.

Basically, if you are deficient in G6PD, then you can't eat fava beans (which is why it is known as favism) and can't take the antimalarial primaquine. If you do [eat fava beans or take primaquine], you can go into hemolytic shock and maybe die. It is said to be the most common and thus most studied enzyme deficiency in the world, and it confers some type of resistance to malaria. More info here if you care.

This condition disqualified me from serving in any malarial countries. No Latin or Central America, no Southeastern Asia, and definitely no Africa.

PC terms

There is a lot of jargon used when talking about the Peace Corps. Here is a fairly comprehensive list explaining them. A link is placed in the sidebar for future use.

• APCD: Associate Peace Corps Director; a host-country national in charge of that region's program
  
• CD: Country Director; the one in charge of the volunteers in that country
  
• COS: Close of Service; the end of a volunteer's service
  
• Country Desk: the department representing regional countries, at Peace Corps headquarters in Washington D.C.
  
• ET: Early Termination; leaving, for whatever reason, before close of service
  
• Homestay: part of training where the volunteer lives with a member of the community (the owners of the house are often referred to in kinship terms)
  
• HCN: Host Country National; person from the host country (it's slightly disparaging to call them "natives")
  
• Host Country: the country where the volunteer is serving
  
• Invitation: a formal summons to serve in a specific job/country after receiving medical/legal clearance, which marks the beginning of one's official Trainee status
  
• IOS: Interruption of Service; when local political or environmental conditions require the entire program to be pulled from an area
  
• IST: In-Service Training; a secondary training event that happens mid-service
  
• LCF: Language and Cross-Cultural Facilitator; trainers responsible for language and culture sections during pre-service training
  
• Medevac: Medically Evacuate; to return a volunteer to the United States for medical treatment, usually because they have an injury/illness that is untreatable in-country
  
• Medical Separation: when a volunteer cannot complete service due to a medical problem
  
• Nomination: a proposed invite to a very general region and job area made during the early application process, pending medical/legal clearance -- highly subject to change
  
• OMS: Office of Medical Services
  
• PC: Peace Corps
  
• PCMO: Peace Corps Medical Officer; the nurse or doctor in charge of all that country's volunteers
  
• PCT: Peace Corps Trainee; volunteer's title during training and before becoming an official volunteer
  
• PCV: Peace Corps Volunteer
  
• PO: Placement Officer; person in charge of officially placing each volunteer in an assignment worldwide; based in headquarters in D.C.
  
• PST: Pre-Service Training; the training program, usually 3 months long, that teaches volunteers language, cross-cultural sensitivity, and job skills before they begin their official service
  
• Recruiter: locally-based representative in charge of providing information on Peace Corps to potential applicants and screening applicants during the initial stages -- the "voice" of the PC
  
• RPCV: Returned Peace Corps Volunteer
  
• Site: the location where the volunteer lives and works for 2 years
  
• Staging: the first day of training, held in the U.S., before flying out to the host country
  
• Swearing-In: the ceremony that accompanies transition from Peace Corps Trainee to Peace Corps Volunteer
  
• VAD: Volunteer Assignment Description; the lengthy document given to applicants describing an assignment in detail, part of the official invitation

First post

I will be updating soon with what has transpired so far in my PC journey. Hopefully at some point I will be able to come up with a better word than "journey" to describe what I'll be going through.

I can also see this blog serving an interesting linguistic function. As I learn Ukranian or Mongolian or whatever and gradually become fluent in it, assuredly my English-speaking faculties will deteriorate and become evident in my writing. It'll be interesting to see what sort of things go and get replaced, and what sort of things are hard to retain and/or regain. I'm aware of syntax blending in multilingual people, so I can look forward to that for sure.