Speculation that 30-year-old Scotsman Jon Anderson Edwards may have found his way into a hippie commune in the western Algarve has given his family and friends hope that he is still alive and well after mysteriously disappearing more than two weeks ago.
Edwards may have joined a “wwoofing, workaway” community, one of which says it is involved in “a wide range of activities here from growing organic vegetables and fruit trees in our terraced gardens to walking and feeding our animals.”
Deeply worried and finding the disappearance “surreal,” Jon’s mother Lesley Edwards had wondered if her son might even have been kidnapped, but the idea of him joining a group of free-spirited hippies seems to fit with his personality and sounds altogether more plausible.
Jon Edwards arrived in the Algarve at the end of August to take up a job as a chef in the Rockfood Café in Lagos. He went back to his apartment feeling unwell one day having said he had fallen and knocked himself unconscious while on the town the previous night.
His employer, Dago Lipke, went to the apartment Edwards shared with two others and suggested he went to hospital. Edwards said he was getting better, but within a few days he had gone missing, leaving behind his belongings, including passport and mobile phone. His employer informed the local police.
Edwards’ sister, Kenna Balion, followed by their mother, Lesley, flew out from Scotland. They found no record of him being admitted to a hospital and there was no response to appeals on his Facebook page. By then the Polícia Judiciária were involved, but Edwards’ sister and mother were not impressed.
Kenna Balion, 31, said that the PJ had still not examined her brother’s apartment 10 days after he had gone missing.
Back in Arbroath at the beginning of this week she told Rob McLaren of the Courier newspaper in Dundee about interviews she and her mother had with the PJ.
“Mum and I were separated and taken into different rooms to give a statement,” Kenna recalled.
“It’s exactly the same detectives from the Madeleine McCann case, the same interpreter, in the same rooms. It was quite eerie.
“The detectives were very informal, wearing jeans and going off to smoke every half an hour.
“They just said that they didn’t think it was a criminal matter and that they would find him.
“They didn’t tell us what they were going to do next and we didn’t hear back from them all weekend. I don’t have a lot of confidence in them.”
The idea that Jon may have joined a hippie commune surfaced only yesterday afternoon. His mother is hoping for good news before she returns home to Scotland tomorrow, Wednesday.
______Len Port 2014
Len Port has been a journalist for 50 years, working as a staff reporter, broadcaster and freelance correspondent for many leading news organisations. He covered events in the Far east in the Sixties, and in Northern Ireland and South Africa in the Seventies. Since moving to Portugal in the early Eighties, he has edited regional magazines, contributed to national dailies in Britain and written several books, two of which are currently available as ebooks with Amazon.
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