Week 8 PST

Hello all! This week has flown by for Ryan and I. Thank you to all of you for your thoughts and prayers for Ryan. He is doing MUCH better.

The biggest event of this week was our site placement. On Friday, we learned that we will be living on the island of Vava'u to live and serve for the next two years. We are so excited. Next week is our last full week of training. We are working hard to advance our language skills and practicum teach in preparation for our new jobs and sites.  The week after that, we will actually get the chance to fly to Vava'u to live with a current PCV for a few days. She will take us around and give us a tour of our new home and schools. We hopefully will get to see our new house to be better able to prepare and plan our move. We will post pictures of everything!

While we are not able to post our village placements for legal reasons, we know we will be living in a small house on a bluff that overlooks the Pacific. In fact, from our house we will be able to see the main shipping channel in vava'u and our nights will be spent watching whales, ferries and ships come into the island. We will also be living 100 yards from the Kingdom's largest freshwater lake where we will do the majority of our swimming and fishing. Other than that, Vava'u is known to be one of the best spots in the world for whale-watching, hiking mountains and volcanoes and scuba diving to underwater caves. It also has a very clean, very small capital city called neiafu. Suffice to say, we feel very blessed to have been assigned to Vava'u and cannot wait to get started!



A picture from the capital of Vava'u.

The other big event of the week was getting our first package! We cannot thank Mark and Nan enough for sending the supplies. Throughout this entire experience I have watched my husband stay composed. From leaving America, to arriving in Tonga, from battling e. coli to speaking with friends and family back home. He even kept it together after learning Iowa had defeated Michigan State. But when he saw the bag of fun-sized Snickers Nan had included in the package, well, I swear he wept!

If anyone else wishes to evoke these types of responses, we certainly love to get mail. If you want to mail us, our new Vava'u address is:

Ryan and Abby Kloberdanz, PCV
Peace Corps Tonga
PO Box 136
Neiafu, Vava'u
Kingdom of Tonga
South Pacific

We will keep this address permanently on the side of the blog!

We will continue to update with more pictures as they come!

-Abby