It has been a while since you have heard from us. Our crowdfunding campaign is finished, you have received your tokens of gratitude and Vera and Frank have left for Thailand on the 30th of April. Their departure was not without hickups. Before leaving, Vera and Frank quit their jobs, emptied their house and terminated their renting contract. Losing a house means that you also lose space to store your stuff. And man, are people good at collecting things! About three quarters of their belongings were given to charities or sold. The rest was put in storage at their family’s or friends places, or taken to Thailand. Arranging all of that on time was not an easy task! But on the 30th of April Vera and Frank arrived at Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam) on time to say goodbye to their family and friends.
Luckily an excellent team will stay behind in the Netherlands to keep the engines behind our organisation running. If you would like to arrange a meeting/presentation, you can still contact us.
The transition to the Thai environment was not as easy as it may sound. At the day of our departure it was a quite cold 5 degrees C in the Netherlands, while Thailand experienced a heatwave of 40+ degrees C. Such high temperatures can have devastating effects on coral reefs, as you can read in the post about the Great Barrier Reef.
A lot of things needed to be arranged after our arrival. Setting up a project like ours is of course not done overnight. Business also works differently in Thailand. You don’t just plan longterm. Arranging a house beforehand is not often done. You just stop by and arrange something on the spot. The same goes for a workplace and a lot of other things. And just when you think everything is well organised, it turns out you have overlooked something. It places you back a few steps and you have to redo some of your work. But if you cannot do that today, there’s always tomorrow! You realise this is quite different than what we are coming from. Still quiet a lot of work lies ahead of us before our first statue will hit the water, but we’re optimistic about the future!