2012
Rick was a career firegfighter and Andi worked in the IT field in Oregon, USA. After Rick hurt his back and had multiple surguries the decision was made to make some lifestyle changes. We needed a place that had good healthcare, good school for our son and the cost of living would be less expensive.
While traveling in Central America, we fell in love with a house on a hill in Boquete, Panama. The medical was good, their was an international bilingual school close by and the cost of living would be much lower. All good, right?
Having no background in farming, no experience in speaking Spanish and no real plan other than to reinvent our lives....we bought the cute, house on the quiet hill in Panama.
2016
We finally paid off loan on the house/land and made the leap to live in Panama fulltime. We sold our 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom house, our newer cars and almost everything we owned (except for Rick's tools and our son's toys which we shipped down in a 20 foot container.)
Once we got here, it has been a huge learning and living adjustment. We moved into out 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom house with limited storage and quickly learned that the internet and electricity to our house was not reliable. The electric would go out for hours at a time on a daily basis, the internet was expensive for the equivalent of 1995 dial-up service. I would have to download a movie in the morning and hope that by the evening it had finished downloading and we could watch 1 show after dinner.
The hope that I (Andi) could continue working in the IT field from our new location was immediately squashed.
Finca Casanga Coffee was born.
Now we know we had no choice but to make a living from the coffee trees located on the property. We would never be the biggest, but we would learn to be the best.
We made many mistakes and took about 3 years to really be able to say we now make good, quality coffee.
2019
This was the year we were going to start climbing out of debt!
2020
The pandemic started and the country shut down for almost a year. We were unable to leave our property except for food and doctor appointments for close to 8 of those months. We could not sell coffee or make any money that year. We decided not to fire our staff and leave them with no money for food, so we borrowed from our retirement funds to feed us and our staff that year.
2021
The post office in Panama did not work after not paying the airlines for mail service since 2019. We lost most of our customers that we were shipping coffee to. Coffee tours were slowly coming back and we started selling more coffee locally.
2022-2023
Post office still does not work. There were road closures and riots in the streets where our side of the country was held captive with no goods leaving or coming in for 4-6 weeks at a time, both in 2022 and 2023. This also made tourism come to a halt for months at a time both of those years.
2024
We are now our on 3rd month of a new president and in theory they will make the post office work again starting with shipments to the USA. However, I sent a test package last month and it took 5 weeks for my package to arrive.
This blog will go through the good and the bad as our adventure continues with living here and being coffee farms in a developing country. :)
I had a blog that was updated frequently on our website, but our hosting company raised our website price from $200 a year to $600 a year and we lost everything. So, starting over!
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