Oriented.

Just a quick post to say orientation is over! We met with our Programme (I guess we're British?) groups this afternoon so I finally got a chance to see who my Peace Education cohort is going to be- minus the 5 Africans and 1 Sri Lankan who are still awaiting travel visas. I look forward to getting to know all of them over the next 11 months.

We've already got our first group assignment too. September 21st is International Peace Day and the Peace Education class is in charge of coming up with a 45 minute program for the whole university to observe the day. Classes will stop and all eyes will be on us.

I picked up my reader for the first course, which starts on Monday. It's a foundation course in Peace and Conflict Studies that we all take together in the morning and then break down into smaller seminar groups for the afternoon for a total of 3 hours/day of classroom work. We'll spend the rest of the day on homework and organizing our group activities. The reader is enormous and I've already started tackling our first assignment.

This morning's trip into San José went very smoothly. We all got copies of our Costa Rican police records and turned in our birth certificates and home police records. Next step on Tuesday is fingerprinting. Then we wait to be processed and hope our colleagues waiting in Africa and Manilla will have a chance to catch up. Please send happy visa thoughts their way.