Swear In

After ten weeks we made it to searing in day!  Today (Monday) G-43 swore in as new Peace Corps Volunteers here in Paraguay!  All of our hard work, sweat, and tears has finally paid off!  We started out the morning getting picked up in our various training communities with all of our baggage that we are taking to site.  I don’t think any of us realized how much “stuff” we have accumulated over the past ten weeks.  Once we arrived in the training center and unloaded all of the vans we arrived to the municipality office where we were going to have our ceremony.  We had about half an hour so many of us decided to get pictures of many of our new friends since we were all dressed up and looking nice. 

The ceremony started with a wonderful welcome from my APCD- Eli followed by a speech by a representative of the host families.  We then had a speech given by one of our own trainees who did a great job talking about what experiences we have had and what we have to look forward to.  After that there was a speech given by our country director and then we swore in as PC Volunteers!  Following our swear in we were able to give each of our host families wonderful certificates thanking them for hosting us and my mom and dad had come to the ceremony for me.  It was a very emotional experience because I have grown so close to my host mother and she calls me her American daughter and she was just crying the whole time so of course by the end I was in tears as well!  After the ceremony we had a wonderful reception with many traditional Paraguayan foods as well as a large cake.  Below you should be able to see the pictures!