The Acceptance Journey: Part 2

About two weeks after my interview, I received a phone call from my District Chairman late one evening.  I was informed that he had loved my interview and had decided that I needed to be boarding an airplane come August. He had done some rearranging and I officially received the status of a 'primary'.


This phone call will forever live in infamy as one of the most exciting events in my life. I managed to keep from squealing in delight, but failed miserably in keeping a mature, composed mannerism. I was scattered brained and breathless from all the excitement. After thanking the chairman, I hung up and bounded upstairs. I told my mom and older brother the news. After congratulatory hugs and exclamations of how amazing the turn of events was, we burst my unsuspecting/sleeping father's room. I received more hugs from my very groggy and slightly bewildered father, before I bounded back out of his room to let him continue his beauty sleep. Such news deserved a celebration with chocolate, so my mom, brother, and I broke out our 'hidden' stash and began our cocoa feast.


After this phone call, the waiting game began. Little did I know that my patience would become less than of a virtue and more of a necessity. I began to check my email every day waiting for news of my country assignment. There was no specific date on which I would receive it, only a vague time frame.

My daily email checks became an hourly occurrence. Soon, hourly examinations left too much time

in between and I began checking my email account every ten to twenty minutes. Sometimes, my obsessive investigations were even more frequent. Hope would flood through me each time I logged into my account to find a new email waiting, but disappointment aways hit hard when I discovered it was not "the" email. I was driving myself insane with the process of checking, rechecking, waiting, and then checking again for "the" email. 

"The" email finally came in December. Because I was visiting one of my best friends at her university, I had decided to put my obsessive email checking habit behind me for the weekend. That night, I went to sleep on the hard dormitory floor without checking my email once. I was terribly proud of over coming my addiction. However, the next morning I had a few spare minutes in which I commandeered my friends computer and gave in to my addiction once again. "The email" from my district chairman containing my country assignment was there waiting for me. I nervously read it, squealed, and then began hopping all around the dorm room. "I'm going to Japan!", I announced to my friends who then joined me in squealing and hopping. What a sight we must have been. To bystanders, we must have seemed like a passel of pigs imitating crickets due to all the hopping and squealing.


I had received my first country assignment choice. My dream was becoming a reality. The hard work my mom and I did filling out the application and preparing for the interview had paid off.  I was could not have been more estatic. Little did I know, more work and preparation was needed before my departure to the Land of the Rising Sun.