The Woman They Still Call Zus

Everyone in Punda's market calls her Zus — "sister" — a name she's carried since she was a girl small enough to disappear behind the pots. Her mother started the stall decades ago; Zus never really left.

Now the government wants to tear the market down. It doesn't like the old construction, she says, and there's talk of a new building to move into — or of nothing at all. It would be a shame, this place holding three generations of her family's cooking.

Five people work for her, and she insists on paying the government tax out of her own pocket rather than passing it on to customers. A plate of her food already costs more than the quick meals sold further away — eight guilders instead of five — and she won't let that gap grow. "That is not much either, but it should not be more."

Tourists are part of what keeps the stall alive. She lets anyone taste before they buy, tourist or not — "then later they come back and eat!" But cruise ship visitors, she's learned, rarely spend much; they've often already eaten on board by the time they wander into Punda.

What worries her more is what tourism can't fix. Life on Curaçao has gotten expensive — supermarkets raise prices because they can, and more people leave every year as bills pile up in ways they never used to. Telephone debts that once went unpaid for years are now called in overnight, she says; plenty of people simply go without a phone. Even Aruba, pricier still, at least offers nicer hotels and better beaches. Curaçao, she feels, is starting to offer less for more — and visitors are noticing too.

"If there's a gun to your head, you don't dare do anything."

Underneath the cost-of-living squeeze sits something harder: poverty feeding crime, crime tangled up with drugs, and a police force she describes as too corrupt, or too compromised, to do much about it. Schools are short on teachers; the private ones that still function well are priced out of reach for most families, so only the children of the already-rich get ahead — a gap tourism's money rarely closes, since most of it settles with people who were wealthy to begin with.

What Zus wants for her island isn't complicated: more life in the evenings, the kind visitors keep asking her about. "It is so quiet in the evenings," they tell her — no nightlife, no carnival spilling into the street the way it used to, no parties drifting on in the cafés until morning. Ordinary residents, she says, have no real say in how tourism here is shaped; she'd like that to change, street by street.

Her advice to visitors is simple: don't leave without seeing the island's own culture. Go find the tumba, the folk dance that returns every year at the Tumba Festival in Brievengat, at the end of January. And eat — really eat.

Come, sit, and taste it for yourself.