I grew up surrounded by photography – my maternal grandfather, mother, and father were all avid amateur photographers and filmmakers. Countless photo albums could be found in our home in Curaçao, while movie screenings and slideshows were regularly held in our living room and at the houses of family and friends who would invite my parents to show their work. That was our entertainment in the nineteen fifties, long before television came to the island.

I do not even dream in Papiamentu. This part of me is totally absent in my life in Israel, where I have nobody with whom to speak my language – as far as I know, I am the only Papiamentu speaking person in Jerusalem. And so, as soon as I return to Jerusalem, I stop living in Papiamentu. Nobody there knows that part of me.

Learning to swim at age five was a traumatic experience. As I have always been athletic and well-coordinated, I quickly picked up the ability to keep myself afloat and do the movements of the breaststroke in shallow water. Then one day we were told to jump into the deep end of the pool.

In her later years in life, my mother loved to tell me the story of how she and a group of other teenage girls from the fancy neighborhood of Skarlo were playing in a boat on the Waaigat, that suddenly got loose from its moorings and began to drift away. They panicked, and did not know how to get the boat back, until one of them had the great idea to let the tallest girl step into the water and pull the boat back to the shore

“My mother, in her late teens, had been on the island’s swim team – few women in her very protected social group would even venture into the water at that time, but she had learned to swim in Cuba, where she was born. I was proud of her, especially because she could do the crawl when all of us only knew the breaststroke, even without putting our heads in the water.

Memory is often constructed - and especially the memory of child. It is mixed with the myths and fictions she is told, making it hard to distinguish the lived experience from the narrated one, or from the one that has been captured in photographs and film.

memories of Hurrican Hazel in Curacao

Going through some old albums, I came across photos I do not remember seeing before – photos of my mother running down the sand dunes at Asunshon, taken by my father in 1940. Seven years later, when I was born, no trace was left of those dunes. All the sand of those 5-meter-high dunes had been trucked away - to be used in construction. Today the bay, on the rough north coast of the island, is awash with rotting sargasso seaweed, just where the dunes would have been.

The sea on the North Coast of Curacao is always rough, due to the constant NE direction of the tradewinds that splash the water against the rugged rocks. Then the winds cross the narrow island towards its South Coast, blowing the waves away, so that the sea there is calm, with white sandy beaches in intimate coves.

The wild North Coast is featured again and again in the films my parents, Frank and Tita Mendes Chumaceiro, made.

The Christoffel Park was established over an area of 2,300 hectares, covering not just the highest “mountain” on the island, but all its surrounding hills (…). This was in 1978, long after I left the island, but on my yearly visits, (…), my brother Fred and I would wander through the mondi in this large park, climbing the Christoffel off-trail from every possible side (…)

The borders of the park gave us a sense of security to explore the mondi without the danger of trespassing on private property and being challenged by an enraged owner with a shotgun.

Here I am, a flower girl at Finita’s wedding. I am smiling at the camera, but I much preferred to climb trees and outrun the boys than to dress up like a pretty little girl.

Why are so many people in awe when I say I grew up on an island?

It is a fantasy, the popular image associated with the word “island”, of a lush tropical paradise with swaying palm trees and long sandy beaches. The southern Caribbean island where I grew up is arid, a rocky desert island, with small, intimate coves, not always sandy.

On the other hand, there is much more to the image of ‘island’ as a lived experience – in terms of what it means to be both self-sufficient and cut-off from the world.”

on a trip to the old Sephardic Jewish cemetery Bet Haim in Curacao - told in the voice of a 12 year old girl

my Padrino and my aunt Chacha, who was blind, had no children and were first cousins of each other. Padrino and Chacha lived right next door to us, door to door across a narrow passageway, as if it was one and the same house.

“Dama di Nochi" - by my grandfather, Benjamin Gomes Casseres - photo taken in Curacao, nineteen forties, early fifties. I always loved this photo by my maternal grandfather and ….

A photograph, by my grandfather Benjamin Gomes Casseres, of Yaya Leonor reading a story from her Papiamentu newspaper to my cousin Ronnie.

I love to play Tarzan. But since most of the time I am the only girl among Dito's friends, I always have to be Jane. It does not matter that I am the oldest and the most agile of them all, that I can run the fastest and jump the farthest

The “binnenwater” – Dutch for “inside-water” – is a very distinctive feature of Curaçao’s limestone coastline, fanning out like a lobed fig leaf with a very narrow stem connecting it to the sea. These lagoons, or inland seas, with their shallow waters, often bordered by mangroves, offer a welcome refuge to aquatic birds.

I always imagined myself a writer. At the age of three I was already writing my name on the blackboard (left handed, just like my mother). Soon I was sewing little books out of discarded paper that I collected from the bins outside a printing press, and writing little stories

My brother Fred had a museum of skulls and bones when he was still in elementary school. It was called Skadot - a name I created out of the first names of the small group of kids who were his helpers. As all our first names started with consonants, I chose the last letter of each - and the name Skadot really stuck, with its close resemblance to the word 'skelèt' - Papiamentu for skeleton.