Women in Bonaire have always had to be independent, she says — a habit built out of necessity rather than ideology. It isn't unusual for a husband to have other women, other children, elsewhere. Looking after yourself, and your own, has long been simply expected.
Tourism has helped with that self-reliance in one sense: it created real income opportunities for women specifically, work that lets them provide for their families directly. But it has come at a cost to family life. Being away from home more means arranging childcare, which means additional expense on top of tourism-driven price increases that touch nearly everything. An after-school care centre has opened, which helps — though she still sees parents, pressed by irregular tourism-industry hours, unable to collect their children on time.
The unregulated nature of tourism work shows up in harder ways too. She's watched friends get fired simply for being pregnant. Bonairians, by her own account, don't protest easily, and so these things are allowed to keep happening.
Tourism has at least provided more education for us. I don't know if we would be better off without it.
She's not nostalgic for a pre-tourism Bonaire, exactly — the trade-offs are real but so are the gains, and education is chief among them. What she notices more is a shift in the children themselves: more attitude, more imitation of tourist behaviour, though she's quick to note television deserves at least as much credit for that as any visitor does. Direct contact with tourists, though, she suspects carries even more weight than anything on a screen.
Her one clear ask of visitors is about respect for local norms. She doesn't approve of topless sunbathing — not out of prudishness, she'd say, but because of what it signals to the island's children and men. Dressing and behaving in step with local standards, she believes, is a small thing tourists could do that would matter far more than they realise.
“I would like to ask tourists,” she says, “to adapt a little more to our culture, to the peacefulness of our island, and to our values and standards.”