Free The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found by Heidi King

business is a short one. But in Canada I am just
like all the rest – I’m Canadian. So I decided to build the Lost
and Found. The red jacket followed me to Panama.
    The building of our eco-hostel was
impeded by the owners of La Fortuna Dam, the huge hydroelectric
plant ten kilometers up the road from our location. The dam is a
classic example of the behavior of a multinational corporation that
grossly exaggerates economic benefits to local communities and
bribes governments to allow megaprojects that suck capital from the
developing world. Built with foreign expertise and financed by
predatory loans, the dam does not contribute a penny to the local
economy.
    The dam’s turbines are housed in
soccer field-sized chambers deep underground. Tunnels large enough
to park a chain of jetliners burrow through mountains of the
Fortuna Forest Reserve. The water generates electricity by tumbling
through the tunnels, and is later regurgitated and spat back up
when there is excess power in the grid. La Fortuna Dam generates
40% of Panama’s electricity, and its owners make multiple millions
of dollars selling power to Costa Rica. The watershed is protected
by law, a law the owners wrote themselves and presented to the
General Assembly for rubber-stamping. They created the vast Fortuna
Forest Reserve, prohibiting all those living within its boundaries
from ever titling their property and effectively squashing economic
development in the region. But they missed a little piece of land
that was titled before the reserve was created. We bought those
eleven hectares, eleven hectares of paradise, a garden of amazing
organic coffee planted among alluring orange and lemon
groves.
    The company’s reasons for objecting to
our presence in the reserve remain a mystery to this day. They
wrote a threatening letter of objection to the Minister of the
Environment and an email to us demanding we leave. Our
environmental impact assessment was rejected even after local
officials had told us to build. We were shut down and fined. Our
life savings were in jeopardy.
    Our fortunes began to turn
after a chance encounter, what I would call destiny if I were a
superstitious man. About a twenty minute walk from the lodge is the
little town of Valle de la Mina. Andrew was there getting some
local food at a small restaurant when a grandfatherly man dumped
out Andrew’s glass of water, filled it with a strange red liquid
and said, “ Dale pues ”. I never really got a handle on what that means. Could be,
‘ Okay then ,’ or
‘ Do it .’
    Andrew did it. It had bite. It tasted
tart and almost effervescent.
    They finished the bottle
and the man pulled Andrew down to his farm to show him how his
organic fruit wine was made. His name was Félix González Córtez,
but the village knew him as Don Cune. As a small boy he loved to
eat an animal known in these parts as a conejo pintado . As a five year old,
he could never get whole word out of his mouth. All he could say
was something like ‘cune’ (koo nay). So when he asked for his
favorite food, he would say “ Quiero cune,
quiero cune !” When his parents wanted to
get him home quick, they shouted Cune . It became his name.
    “ Más
orgánico ,” he would say with a smile that
ran ear to ear, beaming underneath his signature weathered straw
hat, the brim upturned in the style of the Panamanian
peasant.
    Turned out Cune had a passion for all
things organic. Why kill your customers? was his line of thinking.
But Cune had some problems of his own. His coffee yield was down
80% due to coffee rust, a crippling fungus brought on by increasing
rainfall. It was a temptation on a farm just to spray chemicals,
but Cune had worked more than ten years to obtain organic
certification and was just one year away. Because of the rules
governing the reserve, however, he was ineligible for any type of
loan to improve his farm because he had no deed to his home, no
collateral to offer. Although he had lived there for decades,