Woo-hoo! I finally heard from the Peace Corps about an assignment. They emailed me on Friday, April 29, about serving in North Macedonia and after a week of learning more, I accepted. The approximate date of departure is Sept. 25, 2022, though the exact date is subject to change.
North Macedonia is part of the former Yugoslavia. It is a landlocked country bordering Kosovo and Serbia on the north, Greece on the south, Albania on the west and Bulgaria on the east.
My assignment will be “community development associate,” which sounds pretty vague, and it is. The website says these volunteers are in “a range of activities that include, but are not limited to” followed by 11 bullet points. It made me wonder how they decide who does what. But after talking to people who have done this work before, it turns out that local governments and nonprofit organizations apply for Peace Corps volunteers in a manner similar to grant writing. So I could be working for a Scout troop, a town government, something like a YMCA, or just about anything.
I expect to work in partnership with Rotary clubs there. Rotary and Peace Corps North Macedonia have signed a memorandum of understanding for working together, and I doubt that any of the other folks going over with me will be long-time Rotarians. Even if my main assignment doesn’t involve Rotary, volunteers frequently take on side projects, and that can involve Rotary.
The group I’ll go over with will be about 10 to 20 people, far fewer than the usual group size, which I’m told is 50 or so. We will be the first post-COVID evacuation Peace Corps group to enter the country. After one year, a second group should arrive. Normally, all Peace Corps volunteers spend one year as the new people in the country and a second year mentoring the new arrivals. In our case, we won’t have experienced volunteers to mentor us. However, the Peace Corps staff will be dealing with fewer volunteers than usual, so I’m sure they can help us with things that we can’t figure out on our own.
Unlike my original assignment as a teacher trainer in The Gambia in western Africa, this assignment shouldn’t be terribly physically demanding. There are buses and trains to go between towns, so I won’t have to bicycle long distances all the time. Dwellings have running water and electricity, so I won’t have to haul all the water I use for drinking, cooking and bathing from a pump in the middle of the village. The water and power supplies aren’t always reliable, so it’s wise to keep jugs of water in the home in case things go wrong.
I still have to complete medical and legal clearance. Legal should be no problem; I completed that before and haven’t had any run-ins with the law since then. I suspect medical will be easier since I won’t be in such a remote spot where something like a gout flareup could be a real problem. They’ll probably need me to retake the medical, dental and eye exams.