My Role Is Now Played Out

My Role Is Now Played Out

August 8, 2026

By now, everyone knows that tourism in Curaçao is overdeveloped. I do not need to keep going on about it.

So, something completely different. A few weeks ago, an intern from 28 years ago contacted me. He was coming to Curaçao with his family, as a tourist, to introduce his adult children to the island and to the place where he met their mother, who was also an intern at the time. It is a phenomenon I have observed more often. I know many people who once spent time in Curaçao and whom the island has never let go for the rest of their lives.

As agreed through social media, he called me, and we met on the terrace at Caracasbaai. There, I was in for a real surprise. He told me that during a session I facilitated, he had decided to become a facilitator and coach in the field of organizational development.

I am not sufficiently aware of the impact I have on some people. I thanked him and told him that, until a few years ago, I tended to brush aside compliments like this very quickly. But now I realize how much, by doing so, I shortchange both the giver and myself as the receiver. I could tell you much more about that encounter, but that is something between him and me.

He gave me a book about organizational development from a systemic perspective. This is a specific approach that looks at the bigger picture. Instead of focusing on one isolated problem or one individual, it looks at the relationships, patterns, and overall dynamics within the system—in this case, the organization. In a one-on-one session with a coach, the person bringing the issue, for example a manager, is asked to choose figurines that symbolize different elements within the organization. These may represent people—the director, a difficult colleague, the team—but also abstract matters, such as the profit target, the organizational culture, or a merger. The manager then intuitively positions the figurines on a table or a wooden board, a “system or family board.”

I knew the method from education, where it is used to help people—students and educators—grieve and understand their sorrow. But this is interesting. Perhaps we can understand Curaçao from a systemic perspective. That would undoubtedly lead us to, among other things, colonialism and the legacy of slavery. I explored this particularly around the time of the Dutch government’s apology for slavery, but perhaps we need to return to it.

Perhaps we should not return to the past in order to remain there, but to better understand why Curaçao functions today the way it does.

My role in the debate on overtourism may, for now, have played itself out. But perhaps that encounter at Caracasbaai has already put me on a different track.

Miguel Goede