Peace Corps News

We've been very busy the last couple of weeks, which Chris will be telling you all about in a soon-to-be posted blog, and our next few weeks promise to be just as busy. My grandpa passed away yesterday morning, and though we wish we could be in Wichita right now, that just isn't feasible. Instead, Chris and I are headed to Wichita, KS in a couple weeks to see my grandma and family, and celebrate Grandpa. We'll also be able to spend a couple days in Tulsa seeing family there and saying goodbye one more time. Our apologies for all the false alarms!

We received an exciting e-mail from Peace Corps this morning! The e-mail included information about packing (we're allowed 80 lbs each!), staging (aka pre-departure orientation), and the itinerary for our international flight! We had posted months ago that we would be leaving on May 21. We're actually flying from Portland to L.A. on May 18, and we'll leave LA at 9pm on May 19 for Fiji. We're scheduled to arrive in Nadi, Fiji by 10:30am on May 21!

It sounds like some stagings are longer than others, but ours will just be the Fiji folks (we think about 20 of us) and will be brief. Our staging is really just turning in a few forms, sitting through about 4 hours of presentations of the really important info (you know... how to manage risk, departure plans, etc.) and then we all head to the airport for a 13 hour flight to Auckland. From there its a short 3 hours to Nadi. Oh, and while we're rushing through staging process in L.A. we'll all be required to wear business casual clothing.

What else...? Oh yeah, we have an address for our first 10 weeks in-country:

"Nancy Curry and Chris Clendenin", PCV
Peace Corps/Fiji
Private Mail Bag
Suva, Fiji Islands
South Pacific

We'll be reachable at that address until we post a new one on here, and we'd love to hear from you (now or during training)! Speaking of addresses... if you have a new one or want to make sure we have yours, please shoot us an e-mail at clencurry@gmail.com. I've been compiling my list and seem to be missing a few. We will do our best to write some snail mail letters during training as it looks like we won't have Internet access until after the 10 weeks.

Love to all!
Nan (and Chris)