Two arrivals, weeks apart.
On 6 December 2014, Kamila landed in Paje from Poland. Twenty-one days later, on 27 December, Michael arrived from Denmark. Each was carrying a suitcase that was too full. Each was expecting the trip to end. Neither did. The island is small. We walked past each other more times than we will ever know.
We did not meet.
For the next eight years we lived a kilometre or two from each other on the same strip of east coast — the same beach bars, the same fishermen, the same sunset tide — each quietly deciding that this would be the place. Neither of us announced it. You do not announce a feeling like that. You just keep coming back.
The thread, found.
On 8 January 2023 we finally met — in a kite school neither of us had come to learn at. We had each walked in to see the same friend, the one who, mid-introduction, realised what was happening. Eight years of nearly meeting collapsed into one conversation we have not stopped having.
Kamila from Poland. Michael born in Denmark, Polish at the kitchen table — his family in Poland lives twenty-five kilometres from hers. We met on Zanzibar.
Michael was born in Denmark to a Polish mother — Polish at the kitchen table, Danish at school. His family's home in Poland sits twenty-five kilometres from Kamila's. We grew up an hour's drive apart in the south of Poland and finally met five thousand kilometres away. When we say "destiny" we do not mean it lightly. We mean: when somebody walks the same long road and somehow keeps missing you, you stop asking why and start building.
What we are building.
YapYap is everything that came out of the slow recognition. The villa in Paje we host out of. The sushi counter next door Kamila's name sits on. The private community we are drawing for the east coast — East — where a small circle of fellow dreamers will live near us.
We are not a fund. We are not a chain. We are two people and a small team, and our names are on everything because we mean it.
If you ever visit, you will probably see both of us. If you stay, you will see a lot of both of us. That is the business model. That is also the point.