We’re back! After a day of rest, I feel like I can fully commit myself to this last blog post. It was an amazing 9 days and it went by way too fast!
Wednesday was our last full day and we began it with a trip to visit Summer, a very important part of the Tortuguias family. Summer is a 9-year-old male turtle who was found about 6 months back washed up on the beach. He has lost both of his front flippers and suffered damage to both back flippers due to either a shark attack or boating or fishing accident. ARAP houses Summer in their facilities in Panama City, and has been getting him veterinary attention and medicine, but they will need more money to keep Summer healthy. Tortuguias helps ARAP by hosting fundraisers to raise money for Summer’s care. Both organizations are committed to getting Summer prosthetic front flippers and a larger educational facility, which they estimate will cost over $5,000. At Summer’s facility, we talked to the veterinarians and our old pal Marino and took video and pictures of the website.
The rest of the afternoon was split between working and packing. While we had Carla at the villas, we made sure and showed her the mockups of the Tortuguias website. She, Kerya and Franklyn LOVED what we showed them, which really helped us move forward in the process. We split up at 4, with the folks who took video of Summer going shopping in old town and the rest of the group getting video of a Tortuguias meeting. Shopping in old town was a lot of fun! We went to little artisan’s shops, rather than street side stands, and found cool indigenous art, mugs, shoes, and paraphernalia from our favorite Panamanian beer- Balboa.
Once the shopping and video shooting was done, our Elon group and the entirety of Tortuguias leadership got together for dinner. Mari Vicky picked out a tapas restaurant with a view of the skyline, which had fantastic South American wines that yours truly took the liberty of ordering for our side of the table. A few of us survived dinner to go to a local bar with our Tortuguias friends and get some late night snackage. But still, the night ended too early and no one was ready to head back to the villas and have to wake up the next morning to leave.
Our trip home went, luckily, without incident. We have met, divided up the work and should have a great product in about 10 days time to show our Tortu-friends, and all of you following the blog!
