…and then TONGA

The globe in a Cologne travel bookshop is to blame for everything. With her eyes closed, Katharina taps on it to plan her vacation and ends up with her index finger on Tonga in the South Seas. When she and her friend Angelika actually travel from Germany to Tonga as tourists in 1999, she has no idea that she will soon be staying there forever, for love. Love for her husband Semisi, whom she met in a disco at the harbor on Vava’u, and for her newfound freedom in the island paradise. The less sunny sides of a small island in the middle of the Pacific quickly emerge: restrictions, deprivation, earthquakes, destructive cyclones, corona far from medical care, the huge eruption of a volcano in January 2022, which severed the connection to the outside world, economic and existential hardship. And to make matters worse, her marriage to Semisi , 20 years her junior, is on the verge of collapse. Katharina Faleovalu, born in 1955, describes, beyond the dream beaches and without kitsch and clichés, how she fearlessly manages to gain a foothold in Tonga and builds a house and a home with her husband. And how she and Semisi catch a glimpse of happiness.