He makes his living from tourism, so it's easy for him to say he's glad the tourists keep coming. The industry creates work far beyond its own borders — construction, gardening, car rental and maintenance, supermarkets — enough that foreign workers now come to Bonaire looking for jobs of their own.
Those workers tend to split cleanly in two. Spanish-speaking arrivals, often from Venezuela or Colombia, take on the badly paid, unskilled labour. English and Dutch arrivals take the management roles. Bonairians, he admits with some frustration, rarely make it to the top of either ladder — and not entirely through anyone else's fault. Many young Bonairians study in the Netherlands and simply don't come back. And the ones who stay, including his fellow employees, don't push hard enough for their own rights. Neither, he adds, does the workers' union.
Bonaire is not a western surprise in a tropical package. This is a Caribbean island, and we have our own culture.
Tourism has clearly created jobs. It has just as clearly destroyed one. Bonaire used to have a bed factory, everything handmade. When the big hotels arrived and started importing beds instead, the factory couldn't keep pace and eventually closed for good — one trade quietly traded for another.
What bothers him most day to day is simpler: prices have climbed noticeably faster than wages, tourism-driven inflation eating into paycheques that haven't kept up. He doesn't think tourists can fix that directly. But he'd welcome a few small shifts — more meals eaten at local restaurants, and more warmth toward the staff. Too often, he says, visitors arrive expecting the same standard of service they'd get at home, and get frustrated when Bonaire, quite reasonably, offers something different.
And then there's the tip. He's not shy about naming it: a bit more generosity there would go a long way toward making a tourism wage something people can actually live on.
“We need them,” he says, “to earn a real living wage.”