mandevu.net

So while I have been poking around Kampong Thom, it looks like that first crop of Peace Corps volunteers went and got themselves sworn in. I guess that my invitation got lost in the mail. I just happen to hear about it through a friend. I had thought that something might be up, since the tv news reported that Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter had meetings with both the King and the Prime Minister.

According to the U.S. embassy’s website…

In a recent ceremony attended by more than 300 Cambodian host family members, Cambodian government officials, and U.S. Embassy representatives, Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter swore in Cambodia’s first ever group of Peace Corps Volunteers. The 29 newly minted Volunteers arrived in Cambodia on February 2, 2007 to undergo an intensive training program in the Khmer language, cross-cultural awareness, and technical skills related to their community development responsibilities…

…Immediately after the swearing-in ceremony, the Volunteers began to fan out across Cambodia to the provinces of Kampong Cham, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, Takeo, Kampot, Battambang and Siem Reap.

I was wondering if any would turn up in Kampong Thom. Not this go-round. And, weren’t there 30 when they got here?

When Mamamandevu and I were sworn-in in Tanzania, I was one of the lucky ones was selected to address the crowd. Public speaking is traumatic enough. However much to my dismay, I was the third to speak, following two others whose 3 months of intensive Kiswahili language training had served them much better than it had served me. The day before the event, I had asked one of our instructors for help me with my few, well chosen words. She, trusting my abilties more than I did, pushed me into the the deep end with sophisticated gramatical structures and a lot of college-level vocabulary words. It was hard even for me to follow, let alone my audience. To top it all off, one of a crew of particularly jaded and cynical currently-serving volunteers broke the silence of the attentive crowd by laughing at me just as I began my speech (thanks for the derailment, Kate!). It was pretty awful.

Later, my wife and I became good friends with those very same jaded and cynical volunteers, clustered in the back of the crowd and hailing from some pretty remote villages. We wound up as neighbors, within a few hours bike ride of each other, and working together pretty closely.

As for the crew here, none of the four PCVs keeping blogs about their stay have mentioned anything about swearing in and moving out to their new spots. Though there are a couple of excited anecdotes about their first visits to their future new homes, the “site visit” which comes near the end of training. I figure that by now, they ought to be about all moved-in and are busy working on getting settled-in and deconfused.

For more official coverage, a couple of other pictures and excerpts from the speeches at the event, check out the official Peace Corps press release.

Since I was not at the ceremony, I pulled the image above from the embassy’s website.