Flight etc

I lack the emoticon for how exciting this day has been. The first step on my travels is complete and I am writing from Philadelphia- effectively navigating an airline system that has proven to be less than hospitable to me in the past :/ Anyway! I've begun to meet my coworkers and they all seem extremely personable and all bring their own very interesting characteristics to bear. My roommate is a half-swiss biology student that is going over to teach IT. He just got back from his term of obligatory service in the Swiss-Army (no joke that is a real organization) and ran right into service in Burkina. Everyone else has extremely colorful pasts as well, not to mention accents. I seem to be the only person with a generic "US City" accent- it seems as though it's all Bostonians and Montana natives. Our first day of orientation went really well; it was a little dry and I was a little exhausted but it was still fantastic. Philly is also a nice bridge to Burkina in that it is the perfect mugginess to get used to wearing pants in. I really like the focus on sustainability that the Peace Corps takes; the focus on creating programs that the country can maintain without foreign help is really commendable. Also, I found out a factoid regarding the Peace Corps- the budget is around 300 million. For those of you keeping score at home that's less that one B2 bomber (737 million to 2.2 billion). At first I was really disheartened by that but they explained that the Peace Corps does not rely on financial sprees to accomplish their goals and in fact other non-profit organization rely to heavily on temporary flushes of unsustainable cash. Filling an environment with an influx of temporary wealth does nothing to solve the real problems associated with these countries. Instead, the Peace Corps chooses to field determined (albeit poorly funded) volunteers to use local resources to accomplish the goals. All in all the day was very good and I'll try to have more soon on the specifics of what I'll be doing.