A Little Conversation (Written 10/18/05)

Malo everybody. Today was kind of uneventful in regards to new things in the Samoan PC experience (we'll save that for tomorrow when we go to sea for Water Safety) but it was a good day in terms of getting to know the other trainees. My roommate, Josh, is the same roommate that I had while I was in LA – he's a cool guy from the Midwest (grew up in Minnesota and Chicago) and its great to have a guy here who's as into sports as I am. As today was one of the few times I was able to go to the internet café I decided to look on ESPN and find out what the score for the MLB playoffs were and found out that the White Sox are now in the World Series (if there's one thing you miss here its news about the outside world). Now at home I could just share the excitement of this monumental event with Jonas, one of my best friends, but that's not quite possible over 5000 miles away (but I know we are both excited about the prospect of the White Sox winning the World Series – to bad I had to leave the country for that to happen). So it's good to have someone here to share that kind of excitement with on occasion. So Go Sox! Also, we have a guy name Bob here who's a pretty solid guy – nothing really bothers him, everything just seems to kind of bounce off of him. I've talked with him a lot over the past couple of days and he's helped me with my language quite a bit (its amazing what a guy who's so relaxed can do for such a frustrating activity such as learning a new language) and he just brings an energy to this group that you can't describe but will greatly be needed during the rough patches of training that are ahead of us. As he would say 'There's nothing to it but to do it!' Also during the night time I had the opportunity to talk to Bob and Bryan about our different views of training and life in general – and it reminded me that at times in a big group of people you just have to sit back and connect with a few people at a time in order to have successful relationships that actually mean something. Oddly enough, that seemed to be the theme of the day – just getting to know people on a deeper level other then just talking about how the day is going and what the weather is like has been really refreshing. Makes it easier to find people with common interest in this large (yet small) group. We're going to be associated with each other for two years – we might as well start laying the ground work right now.

On another note, in regards to a little conversation, I had one with Life & Work trainer here (Kevin) about possibly making a DVD video to show future trainees at staging (what we did in LA) and I told him about what equipment and software we will possibly need. Again, another Camp Ozark experience coming back to help me out in this Peace Corps adventure – it never ceases to amaze me how important my two years there were in preparation for this job. So who knows maybe by the time Group 76 rolls into Samoa they'll be talking about the video they saw at staging that I made. L8r.