Countdown to Macedonia!

Well... Shell and I are roughly four months away from our departure to serve in Peace Corps Macedonia.  Woowoo!  Since we are so VERY close to flying out, we'll go ahead and start cranking out these blog entries for our own memoirs and for anyone interested in following along in our journey.  Here we go... first, a quick run-down of how Shell and I got to where we are now in terms of leaving for Peace Corps in September 2011.

Summer 2008 - Shelley and Allie Adair travel to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to serve local organizations for a couple months... and fall in love with the people, the culture, and with the NGOs. Soon after Shell returned Shelley and I started talking about the possibility of the Peace Corps.

2008-2010 - We finished up our undergrad years at Hanover College and began our post-grad work at the University of Kentucky.
June 2010 - We begin the LONG Peace Corps application process for married couples. Over the next few months we completed the initial application and a 3 hour phone interview with the Peace Corps regional office in Chicago.
October 2010 - We get our initial placement in Sub-Saharan Africa!  We learn we need to be prepared to ride bikes over "long and tough terrain." Ahhh! But, we soon had to change in our availability dates and we began the long, anxiety-filled wait for another placement. We had plenty of medical, dental, and legal forms to fill out as we waited.
February 2011 - We get a call from the Peace Corps placement office in Washington, DC and are offered another assignment!!! It is often difficult to place married couples for a number of reasons so we jumped on this opportunity.  We learn of an assignment in Eastern Europe where I'll teach elementary English and Shelley will be working with NGO's in primarily youth development.
March 2011 - But what country!?!? We had to accept the assignment before we knew the country, so we did and waited. Could have been Ukraine, Bulgaria, Albania, Moldova, Romania, but we were placed in.... MACEDONIA!

Now we are researching and preparing for our time in Macedonia...  Set up our Skype accounts today and my mom is obsessed :). I'm pretty sure she's just going to Skype us from now on instead of call while we're still in Lexington! ha!

Cody