When I first went to Panama back in 2007 it was a time when Panama had started to be more favoured than Costa Rica and there were numerous investment opportunities. My colleague and dear friend, Sieg Pedde, was doing a major housing development north of David, building large three and four bedroom homes in what was called Mira Del Lago. It was primarily being marketed to rich Americans and Canadians who were ready to retire to a warmer climate. With this influx of Expats I thought there was a lot of opportunities to start businesses and to develop housing and resorts in the miles and miles of pristine beaches. 

One issue in Boquete and for that matter all of Panama was how little rainfall collection they did. In the rainy season we got a ton of rain, none of it collected and then in the dry season there were drought conditions where people in some of the newer housing developments had no water for months. Another issue was that most of the older houses in Boquete had no hot water. I designed a system to both harvest the rainfall and retrofit houses to add hot and cold water lines. I had an investor back in London, Ontario who was coming down to see me to invest in the company Rainwater Harvesting Smart Water Systems, and I had lined up a number of local renovation companies who wanted to partner to install the systems. I even had the local owners of one of the bars ready to add the system to their home because they suffered with no water for months at a time. Just when I was getting all excited the investor called to tell me that his wife had been diagnosed with cancer and he wasn’t coming. The whole project fell apart.