The Journey Continues

Well - here we are at the MCC headquarters (Akron, PA) for our first day of orientation. It is really a different feeling being on this side of the process, moving forward instead of downsizing, retracting, and generally dismantling our life as we knew it. The other unique feeling is being in a group (15 adults all together in the Latin American/Caribbean group) who are on the same crazy journey. We had a great group session this morning with each person sharing how they have come to this point..... lots of different experiences and lots of different routes.

We arrived yesterday afternoon a bit earlier than the rest of the group. We wanted to meet with Marian Meyer, who had been in the Disaster Management Coordinator role in the early 2000's before moving to another position in 2005. The position has been vacant since then and we wanted to pick her brain about the program she had begun and her experiences. It was a very helpful time - she is a wealth of information. We only wish we had more time than the two hours we spent with her. On the bright side, she and her husband will be the new leaders of the Mexico MCC unit so we will have opportunity to meet with her again in the future.

Tomorrow we continue orientation with the full group - folks going to all areas of the world - 60 individuals in total including a bunch of young children. I admire these parents with young children going through this process and taking off to the hinterlands. We did it once, but we are too old for that now.

Speaking of old, so far we have found only one other couple of an age greater than ours, and that by only one year. If ages were laid out on a bell-shaped curve, we would be somewhere between + 4-6 SD. In the lab, we would have considered that QC result to be out of control and thrown out the whole test batch, recalibrated the instrument and started over. Let's hope MCC doesn't use the same criteria.