Personalities In Our Midst | Quepolandia in Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica

Gina Jimenez Artavia

Imagine that you are 26 years old, female, recently promoted to the job of Operations Manager at Banco Promérica in Manuel Antonio. You are about to have your first meeting with other bank executives in San José. You’ve arrived from Quepos early that morning and you walk into the room carrying your agenda and a pen. There you confront a group of officials, mostly middle-aged men with laptops slung over their shoulders, talking on cell phones. That was Gina Jimenez’s introduction to her professional peers in 2005. Read More…

Filed under: Carol Vlassoff, Personalities in Our Midst on April 19th, 2011
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Adrián Vallí

(en Español)
By Carol Vlassoff

Picture a modern-day combination of Paul Gaugin, Pablo Picasso and Jacques Cousteau living in Manuel Antonio, and you may be imagining a real personality in our midst. Adrián Valli, known to most as “Adrián, the artist from Argentina,” paints, sculpts, carves and experiments with different art forms in his jungle studio in El Lirio, Manuel Antonio.

Filed under: Carol Vlassoff, Personalities in Our Midst on March 16th, 2011
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Jeannette Pérez

(en Español)
by Carol Vlassoff

From the moment she set foot in her friend’s sports fishing boat, Jeannette Pérez fell in love. She sweeps an arm toward her front window, with a view of the Pacific waterfront, directly across the street from her second floor office in a modest Quepos building. “That’s what I loved,” she smiles. “I will never forget my first sailfish. It was the most beautiful thing!”

Fifty year old Pérez also remembers her first taste of Quepos in1989. She had been living in the United States and returned to visit her mother in San José with her ten year old twin sons, Manuel and Carlos. When she was offered a job as manager of Sports Fishing Costa Rica she decided to take a look.

Filed under: Carol Vlassoff, Personalities in Our Midst on July 17th, 2010
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Krissia Rodriguez Porras

(en Español)
by Carol Vlassoff

Probably the first thing to strike you when you meet Krissia Rodriguez, General Manager of the largest supermarket in Quepos, Super Mas, is that she looks so young. And she is young – only 31 years old – but she has been working in her father’s store since she was a child.

She laughs as she remembers how she and her sister organized their three month summer vacations: “We agreed to take one month of holiday and spend the other two working in the store. We thought we were working very hard, always begging the cashiers to let us help, but now I realize that we really weren’t.”

Filed under: Carol Vlassoff, Personalities in Our Midst on June 6th, 2010
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Richard Lemire

(en Español)
by Carol Vlassoff

It is hard to imagine that the quiet, self-assured person sitting at his posh desk in Manuel Antonio Estates once stood, cold and penniless, on the Trans-Canada Highway on a December night, pinning his hopes on a ride to Vancouver and a new life. That was Richard Lemire, now a respected leader and businessman in the Quepos-Manuel Antonio area, 29 years ago.

Richard remembers what it felt like that night. He had lost all his money at a casino in Edmonton, including the money he had saved for a car and trip back to Quebec to see his family at Christmas. “I remember being stuck in the mountains in the middle of the night, half frozen. I was happy that I got out of there not owing anybody any money, but I realized I had a serious problem.” Friends had advised him to go to Vancouver, so he hitch-hiked there and slept in a hostel. He found work the next day in a car wash, re recalls, and eventually got a job in construction. “I got myself back on track,” he says, “and I was glad I came to my senses at an early stage in my life. Now I don’t have a gambling problem.” Read More…

Filed under: Carol Vlassoff, Personalities in Our Midst on May 9th, 2010
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Dr. Alfonso Gaspar Martinez del Pino

(en Español)
By Carol Vlassoff

Dr. Alfonso Gaspar Martinez del Pino, born and educated in Cuba, says that he planned to stay in Costa Rica from the time he accepted an invitation to attend a conference here in 1995. Leaving his friends and family, with 63 pounds of luggage (59 pounds of it books) and $145 in his pocket, he set out to establish a new life here. He gave several lectures at the Escuela de Veterinaria de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma en el Barreal de Heredia, and then, he says, “I stayed.”

Filed under: Carol Vlassoff, Personalities in Our Midst on April 19th, 2010
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Constant Boshoff

By Carol Vlassoff

Constant Boshoff – chiropractor, conservationist, coffee farmer and owner of Rafiki - was born in German East Africa, Tanganika. His ancestors moved to South Africa when he was a child because of “political storms over Africa”, as he puts it. Boshoff ‘s father was a big game hunting outfitter. Equipped with luxury tents and a portable kitchen, his father and his party would pitch their camp under the trees at night. He watched his business grow into a very popular tourist destination for high end clients. This is the background that shaped Constant Boshoff’s own trajectory in life.