I am so proud. I am now no longer a PCTP (Peace Corps Trainee Parent) I am a PCVP (Peace Corps Volunteer Parent)! I am also an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer). Daughter Becca has started her PCV experience in Peskopi, Albania. She was sworn in June at a ceremony in Elbasan.
Her Dad and I were volunteers BK (before Kids) back when Peace Corps was still in it's first decade in the lovely country of the Philippines.
Becca is truly a 21st century volunteer.
We had a small portable typewriter and used carbon paper to send letters to our families back in the states. She took her laptop computer with her and is connected by dial-up to the internet. We get email letters from her and are able to read her blog. This morning I saw her latest update just minutes after she posted it.
We had to take a jeepney into town (half-hour ride) in Davao to make an international phone call from the phone company office (or the phone booth at the Apo View Hotel) and we really needed to make an appointment to do it. To make a call from our second site in Bohol, we had to take a 5 hour boat ride to Cebu City to make that call. Becca was given a cell phone by Peace Corps for security purposes. She can call us (an vice-versa) from that (of course international rates apply) I can send her a text message for only 15cents! I just got off the phone with her calling from her computer using Skype. That only costs her 2cents/minute to call our phone and will be free computer to computer when we get our Skype account!
I sent my film home to process and didn't even see some of my slides for 2 years. Now she has a cute little digital camera that she can upload photos from directly to her blog and her online photo album so we can see them almost immediately. Her camera even takes short video clips!
