Point of View

I woke up this morning realizing that in a destructive way, for me, this blog has started to dominate my life.  I understand that that happens.  What interests me is that La Gringa in Honduras has gone through the same thing.  Our blogs are similar, in that we talk about life here and she, too, takes an interest in trying to point out the risks of uninformed decisions to move to Central America.  Lately, however, that seems to be all I'm doing or thinking about, and that's simply not what I want to focus on.

I realized that through the Comments I've come to "know" a few of you--certainly not well, but have gotten a little bit of a nice "feel" as to who you are. 

I'm not concerned about the rich, and I sincerely doubt that any of them read this blog, which is just as well.  But I am concerned about people like us--retirees or anyone else who is living on modest incomes, who is feeling perhaps financial or other pressures and who dreams about getting away "from it all" and fulfilling some--again-- dream, of comfortable living in a tropical paradise.  Too much Hollywood.

It's these people to whom I address my concerns, almost frantic when I read about the innocence and naiveté upon which people seem to be headed towards making life-changing decisions.

Mary and I went through the list of the ex-pats we know around here--not every ex-pat who has moved here because we certainly don't know everyone by any means--and counted how many households are in the process of leaving or trying to leave.  It adds up to 40% or 50%, depending on what we think one person is going to do.  Of 10 households, fully 4 and possibly 5 want out or are on their way out.  The financial loss for at least two is or will be considerable.  I'd hate to see some of yo wind up in that position, or so unhappy that what should be really good years for you turn out to be miserable.

However, I have the nasty character attribute of sort of taking responsibility that definitely isn't mine on my shoulders.  Whether or not any of you make informed decisions, whether or not you come here at least considering the risks, whether or not you're going to continue to be so desperate or so blind or so in love with a fantasy that you move here regardless and then fall victims to the predators, both Panamanians and gringo (especially American), who are here waiting for you, is really not my concern.  

So, thank you to those who have made comments that they've found my blog informative.  I think I was never so happy with the blog as when it served as an information exchange for tick removal and suppression, because that sort of thing is exactly who I am.  I will continue to write about what I encounter here--I have one post in mind about problems with labor that have come up for us quite recently--but mostly I want to document the real reason why we came here--what we enjoy about living in this area.  I'm going to be busy for the next few days, but when I return to this blog, it will be with photos, hopefully videos about the Potrerillos library and the new additions to the school.

By the way, Dan, I did follow up on Charles Colburn and learned some things last night; I intend to learn much more over the next few days. but you're right--he helped the Potrerillos library enormously.

So I want to leave the subject of risks with this warning:  if you intend to buy land and build, you will face the two greatest risks you have in moving here--buying the land and not being taken (no water, for instance) and then finding an honest and/or competent contractor.  There is absolutely no way to overemphasize those dangers.  It's not possible.

If you decide to buy in a development or another type of existing house, you are merely facing those risks once removed.  I know every screw, every tubo, every bag of cement, every piece of rebar, every beam in this house because I bought them and I checked them out as they arrived.  This is not the US--you don't have the same disclosure laws protecting you.  Buying into a development that exists only on paper is or is only partially complete is, at this point, a horrendous risk for many different reasons, not the least of which is that developers are going broke and leaving people high and dry with no possibility of getting their considerable deposits back.

Sometimes I think I make it sound like we knew everything and avoided all problems and had some sort of easy time of it here, because we were all-knowing.  No.  But from our individual experiences in Latin America--Mary spent three years in the Caribbean doing graduate work, me the equivalent of over a year in the poor parts of Brasil--we knew what we were in for as far as culture and the lack of infrastructure was concerned.  We knew the kinds of things we would have to do without but we also knew what we considered to be the benefits.

We also listened to the advice and warnings of some gringos--American and Canadian--who had been here for a long time.  I will be forever indebted to those three people for their kindness, patience, advice, and help.  Without them, and the sharp but honest and extraordinarily helpful Panamanian businesswoman who sold us our land, I don't know that we would have come out of the experience here in any kind of good shape.  We are not rich.  We built here based on the proceeds of the sale of a very modest house in the US, and we live on Social Security.  We could not afford a major disaster and we didn't have one, thanks in good part to these three people.

Without question, we also had a certain amount of luck.  What percentage that was, I couldn't say.  But it factored in.

Even then, we made mistakes.  But after you get through the major hassles, the rest you can deal with.

So that's it.  If you have questions, you can ask me, and I'll give you whatever information I have based on my experiences and those of people I know (within limits--don't ask me about real estate).  But for the most part, I need to get out from underneath what this blog has become.

Water Again

I think just about everyone who reads this blog also reads Don Ray's Chiriquí Chatter.  Today, June 10th, he posted an outstanding article about the problems with water here in Chiriquí.  It's a must read.  It isn't as if he's saying anything really new; he's responding to a Yahoo group discussion and he's repeating a lot as well as adding disquieting news about the meningitis outbreak--I had no idea it was in Dolega, too.  My post on utility reliability contains much the same information except Don has expanded on the information in his post, and he specifically addresses the situation in David, which is different from the rural areas.

I would have to say that pueblo-wide here in Potrerillos, we have water outages maybe a half dozen times a year.  BUT because of water delivery lines and the fact that people tap off each others' lines (yes, it's illegal--just try to get it enforced), you wind up having far, far more outages than just with the main delivery system.

At any given moment in time, I can take you over a 2-3 kilometer stretch of road and point out to you at least two very visible leaks, plumes of water spouting into the air.  They are not IDAAN pipe leaks--they are leaks from private lines.  There are leaks like that--water plumes, easily visible--as you go down the road to Dolega and to David as well.  If you happen to be downstream of such a line and you're on it--well, if there are outages finally in that line, you, too, have no water.  And IDAAN will not help you.

I posted a comment on Don's blog about the fact that right after the tropical depression that became Tropical Storm Alma left us, Valle Escondido, the over-hyped development in Boquete, suffered a mud slide that blocked one of their access roads.  Fortunately no houses were involved.  Yet.

If you go to the Palo Alto area or the Jaramillo Central area and look at the development on the slopes that has turned Boquete into a slum as far as I'm concerned--if you go look at the steepness of grades of access roads to individual residences (I know there are some that are more than 6%--I've driven on them)--if you look at the way pads for houses have been carved out of the slopes--if you're someone like me who has lived in an area where bluffs are unstable when saturated with water--what you see is certain catastrophe just waiting to happen.

Many of the housing (and access roads) that you see on those slopes would NEVER be permitted in the US.  Never.   And for good reason.  One of these days, too many of those houses are going to wash down the mountainside on what is called here a "patina" of mud.

I don't truly understand the makeup of the soil here--it isn't clay--but I can tell you from sometimes scary personal experience that it layers when wet and you slide on it.  Those layers slip.  And that's on level ground.  4-wheel drive has saved our necks, literally, at least once and gotten us out of some nasty situations at least a half dozen times if not more.  But even 4-wheel drive is not going to help you if you're caught in a mud slip.  I know.  Nearly three years ago, I wound up sliding out of control and lodged gently (thank God) against a small sapling--on level ground.  In order to get out of the situation, we had to chop down the sapling (with a borrowed ax) so that the truck could slide just a little further where the 4-wheel drive could take hold.  That occurred maybe the length of a football field from where we live, never mind in a really rough area.  Or on an unpaved road on a slope, of which there exist many.

So water is a problem in many different ways, and you have to be careful.  Don made a point which he should have put in bold and italics--if you're looking at land, particularly in the Boquete area, ask around about water--don't ask the seller.  DON'T ASK THE SELLER. Should you be lied to, take it from all of us--you have no realistic legal recourse. Contracts are a joke around here.   It's Buyer Beware.  Everyone who thinks you are coming here to a United States on the cheap or Paradise is living in La-La Land.  

I hate to be so negative but Don's post actually alarmed me.  If HE feels he has to post about this yet again, then there are still the sheep out there who are ready and eager to be fleeced, who are ready and eager to come nearly totally unprepared to a foreign country, a foreign culture with no Spanish language skills and no idea of what they're letting themselves in for--and who will join the growing numbers of discouraged and bitter people who are trying to sell their homes and get out.  La Gringa in Honduras estimates that the return rate from that country is a good 50%.  I think that for other reasons--after all, it's a little hard to be pie-in-the-sky blind about a country as poor as Honduras--the percentage here will be similar.

It's not that I think no one should immigrate here.  Far from it.  there is a couple who live near us who have been here 5 years or more, and while they have suffered far, far more than we have (right now, for example, they're in the middle of a fairly grim legal fight with a former employee that could cost them literally thousands of dollars), I think they're good for the long haul.  Yet I see signs of stress in someone else we know, whom I have felt for quite some time does not have either the judgement or the skills to survive here.  Some else we know who has been here for 12 years is finally giving up and trying to sell his home (unsuccessfully) so that he can move back to the US.

I have no actual statistical data to base this impression on, but I would guess that fully 9 out of 10 people who came here during The Boquete Boom have no business here.  I would guess that there is a similar percentage still out there but who think that they're going to be on the right side of the statistic.

I think the best way to describe what it takes to thrive here is that you have to have a frontier attitude--not a Hollywood frontier attitude but the real thing.  A spirit of adventure, a willingness to cut loose from what you know, a good set of real survival skills (not urban commuter ones), and a realistic attitude that on any frontier, there is not the kind of order, never mind law, that exists in more civilized places.  In many respects, Panamá is NOT a "civilized" place if you mean by that the sort of comforts you have and assumptions you make in the US, the assurances and protections.  They don't exist here, and there is simply no use whining about the lack.   And you're  not going to get them soon, either--another common and fatal error--"Oh things will be all right once I get there or in a little while".

This is not a first-world country and it's not going to be one in our lifetimes.