My name is Ian Bentryn. Eric Kuhner and I are old classmates of Garrett's from Bainbridge Island. We're working to help out our good friend in Thailand who is in a severe financial crisis. Here is his story:

My name is Garrett Vance. My wife Montira and I live on 17 acres of rare forest habitat in Northeast Thailand. A series of disasters - a major solar system battery fire, the breakdown of our truck, and the loss of our primary income - have driven us into debt and threaten us with loss of our home and our wildlife sanctuary.

We are isolated and living off-grid with few options to prevent this land from being repossessed, logged, and turned into another agricultural plantation. Please join us to save our dream of providing habitat for the many threatened birds, plants, and other wildlife that share our home - as well as giving shelter to the stray dogs and cats who were living here, whom we have spayed/neutered and adopted.

Our home is called Ban Mawa, one of the last stands of woodlands in our region. We are surrounded by thousands and thousands of acres of intensive agriculture and villages. When we moved here from Bangkok six years ago there were still a few pockets of forest around us, but year by year we watched the native trees chopped down and replaced with tapioca, sugar cane, and corn. Ban Mawa's bird population has actually grown during this time as species fleeing habitat loss have found shelter in our woods and wetlands. We are also home to the endangered Asian wild dog, the dhole, who make their dens in the seclusion of our forest.

Unexpectedly, we also became an impromptu animal shelter. After our arrival we learned that many feral strays had been living in the forest. One by one we won their trust with food and then paid to have each of them spayed or neutered. We keep them in fenced areas without access to the protected property. Including the city felines we’d already rescued from Bangkok, our accidental family has grown to 8 dogs and 17 cats!

When we made the decision to move out of Bangkok we were financially sound. I worked remotely for a science fiction magazine and small press in the US and Ban Mawa seemed like an ideal place for a writer. Montira and I are both avid birders and amateur ecologists, so we decided to sell our house in the city and invest everything in a new home surrounded by nature. It was wonderful for a while, but a series of misfortunes have wreaked havoc on our lives.

My employer, a personal mentor, passed away unexpectedly and his business fell into bankruptcy. We found ourselves living far from the city with no steady income. And one misfortune piled on after another. A battery fire destroyed critical components of our solar system, costing us thousands of dollars to replace. The pump for our well failed, and our old Mitsubishi 4x4 truck, a necessity for survival in this rural area, underwent a major breakdown costing us thousands more.

Food anxiety is now a daily part of our lives. Montira toils in the garden, and I help a local farmer in exchange for a supply of rice, keeping the two of us fed and the dogs with something to eat. But the cats require meat, and that’s a significant expense. Going hungry myself is painful, but watching Montira and the animals that trust us go without is heartbreaking.

We live in a depressed agricultural area with no living-wage jobs available. I’ve found some online ad copy work but the pay has been minimal, and even these jobs are rapidly being taken over by AI. We kept pace with the interest on the debt until my latest online job died out, and now we’re no longer able to make the payments. The banks call incessantly, harassing us and threatening legal action. We are in imminent danger of having to watch our sanctuary razed to the ground. Ban Mawa’s trees, nests and dens will succumb to the bulldozers, and this last local oasis will be planted with corn.

With your help, we are hoping to pay off the debt and refocus our energies on protecting Ban Mawa. We invite you to join us and follow our progress as we work to enhance the habitat of this precious living sanctuary! You can follow our progress at https://garrett550.substack.com/p/ban-mawa-nature-preserve and subscribe to receive updates and stories of our lives here with the birds and animals in this beautiful wildlife refuge we call home.

(A footnote from Ian, so that you know how your donations will reach Garrett and Montira. Because Go Fund Me requires fundraisers for most overseas countries to be sponsored by someone in the US, Go Fund Me will make deposits into a domestic bank account I have opened for this sole purpose, and then I will be the person responsible for forwarding your much appreciated gifts on to Garrett's bank in Thailand.)