August 22, 2007: Donald's 60th Birthday!

Today is Donald's 60th birthday, which he is celebrating in Florence with Sarah and two other friends. May the celebrations be long and lusty!

Hurricane Dean hit Mexico, Belize and Guatemala yesterday. The news is full of Mexico's damage, but we can find little about Belize and Guatemala except that Ambergris and Caulker Cayes were evacuated, as was Belize City. Corozal apparently took a direct hit; we remember it as the first place we camped in Belize. It was extremely low lying and right on the water. It was so incredibly poor and ramshackle when we were there; just can't imagine it now and how the people are coping.

Well, it has been a while since we talked. We have the workers here again, building our "shed" so that we can store a lot of our stuff when it arrives, which is currently projected for sometime in September. We decided to build the shed first, since it will take about five months to build Tommy's workshop (which we will get started as soon as the shed is finished). Today the shed reached a height higher than the mason's arms, so he made his version of a scaffold: a rickedy board, perched over two cinder blocks, piled on top of two oil drums. Well, it seems to do the trick!

Our visa applications have been filed! It took over three months to collect all the papers and have them authenticated in their countries of issue. Christopher handled the US papers, and easily handled the undocumented (on the internet and telephone records) move of the Panamanian Consulate from San Francisco to San Diego. Getting documents from Portugal started with Hans and Justina obtaining the required reports, and then our lawyer in Lisbon taking those reports from office to office. This took over a month (!), and cost you don't want to know how much money. He also had to deal with offices which had moved, telephones which were disconnected (with no forwarding numbers), broken copy machines which caused days of delays, bureaucrats who didn't know what was required....unbelievable! At this moment, we are not sure which is the worst bureaucracy: the US, Portuguese or Panamanian! And then, naturally, we had a week of absolute hell when we discovered that the Lisbon lawyer had sent our papers through Portuguese "fast" mail, rather than by FedEx or DHL, as we had requested. The reason we requested the use of these courier services is that Panama has no postal delivery by the postal system: everything goes to a general delivery post office (such as in El Valle), or to a post office box. And the "system" is said to be completely unreliable and corrupt. However, our lawyer in Panama City put his staff to work to find our package and, after a week of searching, the package was located. Champagne time!

Well, we'll come back in a few days. Right now, we want to get snacks ready for folks who are coming over for a drink. Take care!