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.

More on Unrealistic Expectations

I'm working on another post about ticks and Erlichiosis, but thought I'd write further on scaling down expectations, thanks to a comment from a dear Irish Internet correspondent.  Will and I  have never met, but still, given this wonderful day and age of instantaneous communication over large distances, we're Internet buddies, so to speak.  He always brings up interesting points, and I want to address one of them.

Scale down your expectations of services here.  You MUST do so or you risk being really unhappy.  Will's biggest concern is Internet access and he remarked that he hoped through rapid advances in technology, cheap Internet access would be planet wide pretty soon.

For first-world countries, such as Ireland, Canada, Germany, Japan and the US, just to name a few?  Without question.  For Panamá and other 3rd world countries?  I sincerely doubt it. 

 Is there Internet access here?  Yes.  Is it reliable in the way first-world countries are used to thinking about reliability?  No.  Is it cheap?  Except for dialup, which can be expensive for extended use, no.  Is it going to be cheap in the foreseeable future?  I'd say the probability of that is vanishingly small, always allowing for the fact that the Age of Miracles may not yet be in the past.

I'm one of those perverts who finds statistics interesting so long as you don't believe that they're the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  Because I want to make a point, I'm going to bore you to tears with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is the final value of all goods and services produced domestically for 2007.  This data comes from the CIA World Factbook.  Hey, why not use them?  I should get something for the taxes I'm still forced to pay.

Oh yes--all US citizens are required to pay Federal income tax except for very restricted circumstances.  Speaking from personal experience, the IRS dearly loves to harass you, because you're so far away so that you're not likely to go to Philadelphia for an appeal, and you have no real representation in Congress any more.  Welcome to the life of an American ex-pat.

OK--back to my list, in trillions of international dollars for 2007:

World economy:                              $65.8

European Union:                                14.4  Next, by world ranking:

1.  US:                                                   13.9

2.  Peoples Republic of China:           7.0

3.  Japan:                                               4.3    

4.   India                                            3.0   

5.  Germany                                      2.8

6.  UK                                                     2.147

9.  Brasil                                           1.838   

13. Canada                                             1.274

97. Uganda                                       0.31

98.Ghana                                          0.31

99. Nepal                                          0.31

100.Bosnia and Herzgovinia             0.31    And finally

101. Panamá                                     0.29

If you're interested, the complete list can be found here.

I've listed these only to show the HUGE difference in economies.  Panamá ranks right down there with some very poor countries.  Of course the GDP is not the only measure.  An ok one--but one that does NOT take in the disparity in income between rich and poor--is the per capita income.  For Panamá, that's about $4,600/yr.  (The US, by the way, is 7th at $45,000). Ghana is around $700.

You figure out what the monthly average income is here in Panamá:  not quite $400/month.  This number also includes the income or lack of it of the official 25% living below the poverty level as well s the incomes of some very, very rich people here.  According to the UN, Panamá is a country with one of the greatest inequalities of income in the world.  The richest 20% earn an annual family income 32 times that of the poorest 20%.  Panamá in the pst 6 years or so has seen a rise in chronic malnutrition in children under 5.  Over 50% of children under 5 live in poverty and 20% in conditions of extreme poverty.  Courtesy of the World Bank and UNICEF.

Average income for the middle class is considered to be between $12,000 and $18,000/year, or $1,000 to $1500/month.  At the moment, you can still live comfortably on the middle to upper range for the middle class income, although it's now getting much harder at the low end.  But that's a Panamanian style of living comfortably.  Yes, you can afford a car, nice furniture, a TV (but I doubt a 60" plasma, for example), probably a low end computer--and dial-up Internet access.

So?  Tell me, Will, where is the customer base, with these kinds of numbers, for your cheap Internet access?  It'll be cheap for first world with a large base of paying clientele so that volume will drive prices down.  It will NEVER be as cheap for those countries that don't have the base to pay for that access. And you will have to pay.  Maybe in Ireland large communications companies are willing to carry for next to nothing those who can't pay, but I guarantee you the US is not one of those countries.  Any US company is going to have its hand out for payment for services provided to other countries.  Period.  "Cheap" depends on volume, always.

Let's look at Internet access prices right now.  In the US 4 years ago, we paid $37/month for excellent Internet service.  That was a little high because we lived on an island, and things were more expensive there than on the mainland.

Here, Internet access--if you have a landline phone--used to be--I don't know what it is now-- $10.95/month for dialup, with an additional amount--I think 3 cents--per minute of time used.  You could get a contract for unlimited time, but I believe that used to be about $35.  And those were very, very slow speeds indeed.  Very slow.  You can get DLS in many areas, such as Boquete and of course David--even in Potrerillos, it turns out--but I have heard nothing but gripes and grumbles about it here in Potrerillos.

For us, it's not even an option.  I emphasized if you could get a landline because we and almost anyone who is building a new home now (and in the past 4 years) can NOT get landline service any more.  Cable and Wireless is the main communications provider here as they are in the Caribbean.  They are a British-owned company, and they have a monopoly here.  Just to give you an idea about what the general opinion of them is--in the American ex-pat community, Cable and Wireless is referred to as Clueless and Worthless, and they fully live up to that reputation.  The problem is that Cable and Wireless refuses to lay down any more cable (then, shouldn't they change their name?) and therefore new fixed line connections are not available.

Sure, cell phones are available, and we have two.  But it limits us and most others to wireless Internet service, which is incredibly expensive.

There are two main wireless ISPs here, both, as I understand it, costing the same; the more commonly used one is MobilNet, a company based in Panama City but with extensive services here in the province.  We pay $75/month for 256K service.  You can get faster, but the price goes up practically logarithmically.  Thanks to limited access to the country itself, the speed is often much slower.  There are plenty of interruptions in service.  One time we went nearly a week without Internet because the tower for our area, located at the summit of Volcan Barú (11,398 ft), had been struck by lightning during an electrical storm and the necessary parts had to come from the capital.  I might add, that no sooner had they fixed it, the tower was struck again by lightning, and we were down again, but for a much shorter period of time.  Interruptions are frequent whenever there are electrical storms, which in the rainy season is just about every day.

I think in April, when I went in to pay our bill, one of the managers told me with a smile that our bandwidth was going to be increased for the same rate.  She said she'd call us the following week to let us know when a técnico would be out to instal the new antenna.

Anyone who believes the ETA of any service or goods here in Panamá is insane and should be locked up for their own good immediately.  We were told not more than 2 weeks ago about Canadians who live in La Barqueta who really believed what contractors told them for dates of completion for housing, I think.  The Panamanian woman who was telling us the story just shook her head.  "I keep telling them," she said, "not to believe a word they say.  Just relax, take it easy, or you're not going to live long!"  But, she said, they still get angry.  They don't understand.

Mary and I always add 1-3 months, depending on what it is, to any date promised on a stack of Bibles by a Panamanian.  It just doesn't happen that way.  Needless to say, it's more than 1 month later, and we haven't heard a word.  Since we never expected to, it doesn't bother us.  

MobilNet, by the way, is one of the better-run companies we've encountered here in Panamá.

You must scale your expectations back.  You must face the reality of what it's like to live in a 3rd world country.  If you don't, you raise your probability of being unhappy here to near 100%.

Please don't bank on pipe dreams that are based in first-world reality.  If you're depending on technology making your life happy here, you're making a huge error.  

We're happy here because we don't have the same expectations that too many gringos do.  We like the life style, we enjoy Panamanians, we knew what we wanted and knew what the price would be.  For us, it isn't high.  But then we both knew from the start what we were getting into.