Our Story and our Staff

Many people ask us “How did you end up in Costa Rica? What’s Your Story?” So we’ve decided to finally write it all down.

After raising our two daughters, Amanda and Tara (the inspiration for the name Ama-Tierra) in Southern California and Arizona, we were looking for a new experience. Our love of travel and desire to live in a foreign country combined with a growing awareness that life in the good ole’ U.S.A. was spinning at an inhuman pace. Facing another four years of a George Bush presidency was not a pleasant thought, especially after Jill had worked on John Kerry’s campaign in southern Arizona. All of these things together propelled Jill to expand her vision of wellness and create a place where people could take a time out from life, de-stress and heal themselves.

Bob, meanwhile, was seeing the writing on the wall after 40 years in the music industry, watching digital downloads replace record stores. He, too, was ready for a change. We started making plans to leave the U.S. “It was just becoming bad medicine for me, feeling so frustrated every day,” Jill says of those months leading up to the move. “I felt the country was asleep, and I wanted to go somewhere that was more in line with my beliefs, a place where I could actually make a difference.” But where was that place? As a family, we had traveled often to Baja, Mexico, but options were limited there for clean water, growing organic produce and becoming self-sustaining along the desert coastland.

We had heard good things about Costa Rica. The country has no army since 1949, which means they will never declare a war – a refreshing thought for Peaceniks like us while the Bush/Cheney duo was destroying Iraq and Afghanistan. Friendly people, a stable democracy, a government who cares about education (Costa Rica has a 96% literacy rate), giving everyone medical care (no one is turned away at the public health clinics), and concern for the environment (26% of the country is national park or forest land with successful reforestation programs in place). These were all encouraging factors in examining where our values might find resonance south of the US border.

Our daughter Tara was already planning to spend her junior year of college at the University of Costa Rica, so we sold the big house in Tucson, got a full price offer the first week (talk about the Universe supporting us—WOW!) and in June of 2005, the four of us jumped on a plane to Costa Rica for a two-week journey around the country. We looked at land, since the idea was to build our own yoga retreat and wellness center. We visited coffee farms, rustic homes made of wood, bamboo and thatched roofs, and even a few cement houses with bare lightbulbs and wiring strung across the ceilingless rafters. We reveled in the cultural differences, feeling excited about the possibilities. We visited coastal areas with crazy potholed roads and growling howler monkeys. Bob remembers, with good humor: “One day I’m standing in the pouring rain with mud and cow pies under my tennies, watching Jill actually smiling as she talked to the owner of this coffee farm as he stood next to his cows and I’m thinking, God, what have I gotten myself into?”

Throughout the particularly rainy two weeks, Bob kept asking: “When are we going to see that Finca Que Ama place?” It was a small hotel for sale in the mountains, owned by a young Israeli couple. We had read about it in an online journal called “Escaping America.” Sounded about right.

“Don’t you remember? It’s out of our price range,” Jill said. We dropped Tara at the beach in Jaco – her home for the month before beginning her study abroad program in the city – and went home with our older daughter Amanda to Arizona to digest all we had seen.

An email awaited us, from the couple at La Finca Que Ama, which translates to mean “the loving estate”. It read: “If you are still interested in our property, we have lowered the price and are willing to talk terms.” Hmmmmmmmmm….Bob’s intuition was right. But darn, we hadn’t even stopped by to visit! Ok, but Tara is there, we thought, and she’s even closer to the owners’ age than we are. Let HER go see it! Neta, a smiling and short-haired 27 year old and her husband Arbel, the bearded artist who loves Reggae, were gracious hosts the very next week. Tara called us from the hotel: “Mom”, she said “when you see this place, you’re going to want to do whatever it takes to make it yours”. Wow. In September we went back to Costa Rica, accompanied by our friend and psychic advisor Veronica, to see the place, feel its energy, and check it all out. And needless to say, we fell in love.

We didn’t have all the money together (does anybody ever in these sorts of situations?) but we scrambled to learn our best about how to find investors—talking to friends, lawyers, financial advisors; it was a big learning curve. We learned how to write a business plan, and make projections. In the end, we raised the minimum we needed, and just eight months after we first set foot on rich, fertile, Costa Rican earth, we were the proud owners of a 10-room hotel, with a dream-like vision to create our yoga retreat and wellness center.

And the rest, as they say, is history.