Long Time No Hear

Quite some time has passed since our last blog in English. This was due to an overload of work. As you may remember, we submitted two business plans to two competitions. The plan submitted to the Business in Development network (www.bidnetwork.org) made it to the finals (we wrote that Kees can write a good proposal!). This meant that Kees (or in fact Cornelis), under whose name the proposal was submitted, was invited to go to Holland for a week to participate in the finalist week. So we won one ticket and we decided that Loes should come along for moral and other support, so we went to Holland from 21 November to 12 December.

The finalist week was very interesting and a lot of fun. Unfortunately we did not win one of the money prizes, but we made many new contacts and expect to get an investor soon. And we know that we have a good business plan. The group of people and the type of business they proposed was very diverse: we had a Tadjikistani selling dried apricots, an Argentinian furniture maker, a Kenyan ophthalmologist and Indian doctors to mention just a few. Lots of interesting people all full of ideas and energy made for a wonderful week. We also made contact with a tourism student who will come to Panama to help us with marketing and development of tours!

We spend the remainder of the time in the Netherlands visiting friends and relatives. The last bit is getting more and more time consuming as the number of relatives keeps increasing. Grandma is still alive, for which we are grateful, while our brothers, sisters and cousins start procreating. And we have to be introduced to each new family member and will then proceed to forget even more birthdays…

Another thing that kept us from writing sooner, is the fact that just before going to the Netherlands we moved from Santiago to Mariato, which is much closer to our property. We expect to start building the lodge in the next three months or so and our experience is that you have to be really on top of your building contractor if you want to get what you asked for within the time you asked for it. This has also, again, been our experience during the construction of the bathroom near the ranchos. Some say that moving house is one of the most stressful events in someone’s life, but I disagree; I am sure that building a house is much more stressful than merely moving.

In the mean time, the trees keep growing and what is even better; they do so without any supervision. And now that the grass is setting seed and starting to fall down, the newly planted trees suddenly become much more visible. All of a sudden we realize that some trees have actually been growing pretty fast over the last couple of months. We also note changes in the type of animals on our property. Since a few months black striped sparrows are much more common than before, while eastern meadow larks have all but disappeared. Other new visitors are crested oropendolas and once a toucan (but that one did look a bit lost). Mammals are still elusive, but we have seen tracks of raccoons, opossums and armadillos.