Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday, strange though it was without our PCT's. I'm anxious to hear how their festivities went as I expect are you.

We haven't spoken with Mari since they left for their final 3 weeks in the village and are planning to call her sometime mid-week this week. (Her family has a phone she said we can call and try to reach her.) If any of you has news to share from successful Falevao contact we'd love to hear it or if you wish us to pass on a message from you to your son or daughter, please let me know and we'll try to do so if our call is successful. We plan to try to call on Wednesday evening (November 30th).

One news item, we finally received our first airmail letter from Mari - mailed about 4 weeks before it arrived here and she received some cookies I sent her airmail (took about 2 weeks). Nothing we sent by ship has arrived, including 2 boxes she sent herself about a month before they left. I'm curious to know if anyone has had more success.

Best, Rudi and Al

Comments

Hi Again,

We were having some problems with "spam" in our comments, so I've changed the comments settings so that only blog members can post to the comments. Please let me know if you have any problems posting. Sorry for any confusion this has caused. I've posted responses (in the comments below) to both the telephone and shipping postings.

Meet the Parents...

I'm Mari's Mom, Rudi, and am hosting this blog for Parents of Peace Corps Samoa Group 75 trainees. If your son or daughter (or mom) is in this group and you're not yet a member of the blog, please send me an e-mail and I'll send you an invitation to join. Then you'll be able to post here too.

Mari grew up in Irvine, California, where her dad Al and I live and work at the University of California. We're both biologists and love exotic travel (as does Mari) and are thrilled to be able to experience Samoa through her eyes. We also can't wait to see her new home and meet her new friends and family!

So far, though, we're happy to have so much information from all the Group 75 bloggers (see links on the right) and to talk to her when she's in Apia. If you're looking for a good, relatively inexpensive long distance phone card, I'd recommend the one sold online by tel3advantage (http://www.tel3advantage.com/). I've bought a prepaid $25 card and chosen the automatic recharge option. Whenever the card runs out of time, my account is recharged (even if I'm in the middle of the call) and the interruption is very brief and doesn't require a new call. The rate is $.38 per minute. If you've found a less expensive rate, please let me know.

Please join this blog and post information about yourself and your Samoan parent experiences!