7. First month of Curaçao

Dear Reader,

Last 4 weeks I started with the actual research and it is great! I already had many interviews and more informal conversations with divers, local fishers, managers, project leaders, researchers, and restaurant owners about the past and current situation on Curaçao. It turns out to be really chaotic, with a lot of conflicts and collaborations between different social (sub-)groups. However, this makes that the project is even more interesting for me to understand and soon to find patterns in all of these interconnections. At the same time I have contact with multiple fishermen who are willing to learn me a lot about their fishing methods and their way of living. For example, some fishers in Boca Sami have taught me a lot about how they catch the local fish specialty of the island: Masbangu. This fish is caught by a large net, together with 8-12 fishermen who pull the net full of Masbangu together, and afterwards they scoop the fish inside the boat. This will give them an income for 8 families to live from. Learning about these methods, asking them about the change in fish populations over time and their perspective on the relation with coral reef change, already gave me a lot of knowledge on their perspectives on coral reef health of Curaçao.

Besides the fishermen, I also have a lot of contact with divers from multiple backgrounds and on a variety of locations on the island. A lot of divers I spoke with, have a totally different understanding of coral reef systems than the local fishermen, which seems logic to me, because divers explore and enjoy the coral reef and fishers catch the fish of the coral reef. It is not as simple as that, but there is a difference between those two understandings of the reef. However, this difference in understanding of the marine environment, already gave me insights in how these people frame the marine environment’s situation. If I ask divers to give their idea on coral reef health, they give me an almost scientific definition about how they think the reef works. If I ask fishermen to give their idea on coral reef health, they say that they don’t know how it works, but that God or the Ocean just provides them with fish, food or income. These different ideas on the marine environment and how the understanding of the ‘normal way’ to use it differs that much, have sparked me with even more interest.

Soon I will give some more updates, but for now I make myself ready to give some more interview to two marine park managers this afternoon.

Michiel