DC is overrun by Minnesooootans

It really is uncanny how many Minnesotans there are out here! And I seriously was not expecting to meet somebody else from my own little Minneapolis suburb also working at the Peace Corps! So once or twice a week there are "Brown Bags," AKA lunchtime presentations for Peace Corps interns to bring their lunches and learn about different aspects of the Peace Corps (it is incredibly cool they do this). One of the first ones was a history of the Peace Corps, others are what each region desk is up to, and the one I went to last week was by the Congressional Relations office. Once all the interns were seated and given a spiel during initial munching, we were all charged with a task. The difficulty level of going around the room introducing ourselves was increased significantly as we were asked to say our hometown and our representative in Congress in addition to our name and our Peace Corps department. But I was quite lucky, in fact, because the Acting Director and her assistant did the model introductions, and the assistant was from Minnetonka, my little suburb! Thus I no longer had to rack my brain to remember who my representative was because when it came to my turn (and I happened to be last), I just got to say, "Hi, I'm Kathryn. I work for the VDS (Volunteer Delivery System) team in VRS (Volunteer Recruitment and Selection), and I'm from Minnetonka, Minnesota too!"

Now I kind of hate the DC mentality of networking for the sake of networking, but I'd say I've been rather good at taking advantages to meet new people, and it's just been really fun to learn about a wide variety of aspects of the Peace Corps while I've been here (with wonderful encouragement and assistance from my coworkers). So even though Alyson works up on the 8th floor in the Congressional Relations Office, and I am down in the VRS Department on the 6th floor, she said "We gotta talk!" Just like basically all of the Peace Corps people I've met, she is so nice and really gushes about her Peace Corps experience, so she invited me out to lunch today and in a cute little cafe we got to talking about what brought us out to DC. She is helping coordinate an event on Capitol Hill for DC interns by the Peace Corps director and the 6 return Peace Corps volunteers in Congress, and hopefully I'll get to help out with publicity and also attend the event! Minnesotans looking out for each other.