Top Ten Things to Go Not Quite Right with Medical Clearance (So Far)

1. We were caught in a Catch-22: The PC requires we get married six months before we are ready to depart, and we had to show that before we were nominated. Once we got married, we lost our parents' insurance and so would have to pay for medical clearance out-of-pocket.
   
2. We tried to contact VA Hospitals to get our medical clearance done there since (in theory) they are partnered with the Peace Corps and will do it for free. But the VA hospitals in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia, MO showed no interest in helping and were actually pretty mean.
   
3. We finally contacted the DOD hospital in Fort Leonard Wood, MO. The woman there was really nice and agreed to help us, but they couldn't see us for two months--until October 20 at 8 am.
   
4. Since the appointment on Oct 20 was at 8 am and I am about 3-1/2 hours away, we decided to go to Ft. Leonard Wood the night before and make a reservation at a hotel. But I had a night class the night before the appointment that I couldn't miss and so we didn't arrive until about 12:30 am. By that time, the hotel had given up our reservation to someone else and had no rooms left (we felt like it came straight out of an episode of Seinfeld); the hotel owner assumed that we would have arrived earlier if we were going to come because he saw that my cell phone's area code was from an area code not very far away. Instead of using my cell phone number to call and ask if we were coming, he just assumed we weren't.
   
5. Neither of us had ever been on a military base before, and did not know that, post-September 11, it's a pretty big deal. We were required to show the original proof of registration for my car (which was at home) and proof of insurance (and I hadn't gotten my new card yet--the old one had expired not two weeks before). But we eventually made it inside after calling my insurance agent to get the insurance verified and looking up the car registration... that only made us about 45 minutes late for the appointment. :)
   
6. The blood work took a few days to be processed, so the doctor kept our paperwork at the hospital and said he'd mail it to us, along with the blood work, once they received it. We did receive all the paperwork a week or so later, but failed to noticed for two additional weeks that he had forgotten to sign both of our packets and forgot to fill out the box on my paperwork that says I'm negative for all the infectious diseases.
   
7. We mailed back the packets (after making photocopies of everything) and included Post-It tabs everywhere that the doctor needs to sign, a cover letter kindly explaining what was missing from the forms, and a self-addressed, stamped envelope for them to mail the paperwork back to us. We did not know that it would take 10 full days for them to receive the packet because of enhanced security or that they take an extended Thanksgiving holiday.
   
8. I had received a dental checkup recently, so the dentist was just able to fill out my paperwork and include my x-rays from that. Paul, however, was due for a checkup and found out he had a cavity. The checkup, x-rays, and filling cost a whopping $488. Yikes!
   
9. We mailed in our dental packets on Monday, November 27 and for some reason the tracking number isn't working...
   
10. We haven't received the medical packets back from Fort Leonard Wood yet and still don't know if they're filled out completely. Then we have to mail them in and hope they arrive safely...
    

And then we actually have to get cleared medically. There's a long road ahead...

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We're Not Procrastinating (anymore)

All right, it's the middle of November and we haven't even sent in our medical packets yet. We got them at the beginning of September and after a month or so of fruitless calls to the VA hospitals near us, I finally had some luck at a military base about 2 hours away. We had to go to a federal facility because we didn't have the $1500 or so that it would have cost to get the tests done on our own (no insurance--sorry mom!). We had our appointment set for the middle of October and after an undue amount of bureaucratic fervor we made it onto the base late but in enough time for our blood to be drawn for the labs and for the doctor to see us before lunch. We considered ourselves lucky to be back home before dark, but we still had to wait for the lab results to come back before we had our forms filled out and mailed to us.

After we got our packets back Holly noticed (after I failed to for a week or so) that our forms weren't signed by the doctor. We are going to have to mail them back and cross our fingers that we can mail them to the Peace Corps sometime next week. Now I really regret waiting at all after we got the forms, but maybe this way we won't have the months of waiting that punctual volunteers complain about ;).

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No reservations

JERRY: I don't understand, I made a reservation, do you have my reservation?
RENTAL CAR AGENT: Yes, we do, unfortunately we ran out of cars.
JERRY: But the reservation keeps the car here. That's why you have the reservation.
RENTAL CAR AGENT: I know why we have reservations.
JERRY: I don't think you do. If you did, I'd have a car. See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don't know how to hold the reservation and that's really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody can just take them.

To be continued.

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Nominated!

When Paul and I first decided that we wanted to join the Peace Corps, we wanted to teach English in a Spanish-speaking country. When we first began looking into the Peace Corps, however, we quickly learned that Latin America doesn't request teachers and so there were no TEFL assignments in Spanish-speaking countries; once we learned that our top choice wasn't an option, we still remained excited about the Peace Corps and decided we'd just learn a different language and go somewhere else.

Though Paul and I were certainly disappointed in May when we weren't nominated, the wait was well worth it! Last week we received a call from our recruiter to offer us a nomination. Our recruiter began by saying that he was surprised by our nomination and didn't think this would have been an option for us, but that we were being offered a spot teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) in Latin America and leaving either in April or May 2007. This is exactly what we've been hoping for for nearly two years now and we could barely contain ourselves on the phone.

It turns out that there is just one TEFL program in Latin America and it is brand new; the first group of teachers left sometime in 2006, and we'll probably be just the second group to participate in the program. Right now we feel excited and very lucky because we've always read that the Latin America positions are some of the most competitive and coveted, let alone the one TEFL program in Latin America.

We were immediately curious where in Latin America we might be going; a nomination only provides the region, assignment, and month for departure; the specific country isn't known until the invitation is received only a few months before the actual departure. However, with just one TEFL program in Latin America, we thought we might be able to do some detective work. Eventually I came across this article, a press release on the Peace Corps website discussing how the PC program in Nicaragua is being expanded to include a TEFL program. We certainly don't want to get our hopes up on a hunch, but this seems pretty convincing! We're especially excited about a potential Central America assignment since we loved our trip to Belize earlier this summer.

From here our tasks our to fax in a copy of our marriage license, wait patiently for our medical packets, and try not to get too excited about our dream nomination!

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Oh yes. There will be waiting.

We heard back from our sincerely nice and helpful recruiter at the end of May who told us that they couldn't find a spot for us in the March/April/May slot, so they'll try again in August. The bad news is that we probably won't end up in Africa. The good news, however, is that we'll most likely be in Eastern Europe.

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