Swearing In

I realized I forgot to mention anything about the swearing in ceremony. Not too much to say, but I do have a couple of thoughts on it...

The night before swearing in we had a dinner hosted by some of the current Peace Corps volunteers. Everyone was quite nice, but the excitement was definitely a little overwhelming. A lot of the volunteers were almost frantic in their excitement to be seeing everyone and drinking/partying. I guess maybe after a year of isolation in my site I'll be the same way--vamos a ver (we will see).

The actual swearing in ceremony was okay. The majority of it was done in spanish, with speeches given by the director of Peace Corps El Salvador, the director of the Municipal Development program, and a fellow trainee whom we nominated to give a speech. My boss, the director of Youth Development, had the privelege of interpreting for the U.S. Ambassador who was at the ceremony. Yes, that's right, of all the capable, spanish speaking citizens of the U.S., we still choose to have an Ambassador to El Salvador who does not speak spanish. His speech was given in English and translated paragraph by paragraph. He even made a joke, saying that he is learning one new spanish word a day and his word for that day was 'pinguino' (penguin). I'm glad he's not wearing himself out learning 2 words a day...that would just be too much. And it's also good to know that he is focusing on vocabulary that will be useful considering the penguin problem here in tropical El Salvador.

After the ceremony was the party. 10 dollars all you can drink from 10-1. Amazingly, I did pretty well in that I felt I drank more than my 10 dollars worth, but I didn't over do it. Others most definitely did, and there were definitely some funny/scandalous scenes to be entertained by. Kind of made me nostalgic for those cottage wop parties at Mac.

Well I gotta go catch my bus now, otherwise I'm stuck here for another 2 hours. Adios