Newsvideo 9
Dear followers of my project,
First of all I want to wish all of you happy 2019! I write you all to update you about the developments of my project ‘Eco Bus America’
As I indicated in the previous newsletter, the try-out tour I did in September and October was a great success! I have reached a lot of people and I could inspire many people! If you have not watched the videos of the try-out tour (yet), then I invite you to click on this link that leads to all the videos that I put on youtube during the tour. There is a video of every week. Eight videos in total.
From the moment I am back in the Netherlands, many positive developments have taken place. I would like to share two of them with you.
When I traveled around Argentina a year ago and walked around one day close to the Iguazú waterfalls, A parked VAN suddenly captured my attencion. When I got closer, I saw the text on the bus and I watched through the windows, I felt that I wanted to know more about this bus and the people who were traveling in it. I wrote the name that was written on the van and in the evening I started googling. It turned out to be a family that was traveling with three children in the most environmentally friendly way possible. I immediately wrote them a message and the next day we were having lunch together in front of their VAN. We found out that we actually had a lot of shared values and dreams. They gave me a lot of recommendation about how to convert a VAN and how to search for sponsors. It was a beautiful afternoon in which I started to believe even stronger that ‘coincidence’ does not exist.
After my try-out tour in Europe, the initial plan was to buy a van in the Netherlands and, together with that van, to sail across the Atlantic ocean to South America. While searching for VAN’s on the internet suddenly I thought about the family that I had met. I decided to write them, to ask how their journey was going. They sent back a message that they just happened to be looking for a permanent place to live because the eldest daughter needed it. After a little back and forth messaging, I asked them if they already knew what they were going to do with the van while they live on a permanent place. There was not a clear answer to that question yet, but as you probably already feel… This story has a great end because after a lot of sleepless nights, so was the message that I got a few weeks later from them, we decided to sell ‘BOB’, which is the name of the bus! You can imagine how I felt at that moment! There is currently good contact with this family and they are willing to wait until I have enough money to buy BOB because he is not for free of course ..
The second ‘coincidence’ that happend is that, three days after I came back from the Europe tour there had been a six-month contract offered to me as a family coach in Amsterdam and they even wanted to pay my travel expenses. I live now until the moment I go to South America in Lunteren with my parents (to be able to save more quickly) and I work in Amsterdam.
As I said, the ‘VAN’ is not free, so at the moment I am busy and working hard to find larger organizations to request financial support.
The bus is there! That is a great step and he is already in Peru! There is only one big thing still to be arranged which is finding a sailing boat that brings me from Europe to Peru sailing across the ocean. Not on my own, of course, but I want to find a boat that can take me. Ideally all the way to Peru and otherwise first to the Caribbean and then a transfer to another boat that can take me to Peru. I have registered myself on some websites where people with a boat are looking for other crew members, but there are also boats that transport goods from South America to Europe and vice versa. I think this is even more interesting because they purposefully transport goods in an environmentally friendly way. It is still a big job to find this boat but I have confidence that I will find it. I want to start sailing at the beginning of August this year.
Lots of love!
