The Adventure Begins

For all of you, friends and family, who have been asking if we are going to create a blog, here 'tis. And just so you know, the 'madfine' in our URL makes no reference to our emotional state. We understand that many of you do indeed think we are nuts and are taking the 'midlife crisis' thing to a new extreme, but the eponym actually just stands for 'marti and dave fine'. Honestly though, most of you who know us well have said that our joining the Peace Corps really doesn't surprise you. Should we take that as a compliment?

OK, so here we are, on the first leg of our new adventure. After many months we closed on our Fox Point home two days ago. Yesterday we made our final deliveries of goods to be stored, cleaned the house where we had been house-sitting for the last four months, loaded up the minivan with our bicycles and stuff that we want to have with us for the next two months and drove off into the sunset. Well, actually more like driving off into the construction/accident traffic of Chicago before leaving the sunset behind en route to Detroit to visit with Dave's family for a couple of days. Tomorrow we'll head south to get to our son Larry's near Atlanta by Friday. With a little luck there'll be time for a bike ride along the way.

We'll keep you posted as we travel to GA, SC, NC to visit and bike and return to Milwaukee by mid June, when we'll sell the minivan, then ride our bikes to Detroit for a week-long visit with the family there again, before riding back to Milwaukee for a ten day period of being with friends and finishing up business before departing for PC staging on July 17.

Staging is a 3 day stateside orientation that will take place somewhere on the East Coast, we presume. We'll know when we get our airline tickets. Then we'll fly to Johannesburg, South Africa with our group of PC trainees on July 20 for 2 months of culture, safety, language and technical training. We will get the address of our training before we leave the US so we can let you know were we will be for those first two months. After training we will graduate to volunteers, at which time we will find out where we will be posted. All we know right now is that we will be in one of four provinces in the northern half of South Africa: Limpopo, Kwazulu-Natal, NorthWest, or Mpumulanga. Where we end up will determine which local language we will learn. Our job title is 'capacity builder', working with NGO (non profits) or CBO (community-based organizations) with HIV/AIDS. Basically, we work to 'build the capacity' of an organization to meet the needs of their constituents with the disease. But really, we won't know our true job description until we get there.

We are very excited about going. It's been a long haul since beginning our applications over 18 months ago. Thanks to our friends for suffering through some of the trials and tribulations with us. Thanks to several of you for sharing a corner of your basement for two plus years. And to those of you who are in our household loan program, enjoy whatever item/s you now use. When you do use it/them, please think of us and hey, that'd be a good time to write us an email!