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The roots are on the previous page. This is what grew from them. Not according to plan — according to the question.
My Journey
My Journey
2022 – The First Seeds
I wanted to learn more myself — so I organized it. I invited Roland van Reenen to Aruba, found the participants, made it happen. Eighty people showed up. Something started that I couldn't have planned.
From those workshops, SyntropicA was born — a grassroots community of people on Aruba who wanted to grow differently. I became a certified teacher in Syntropic Agroforestry. And in June 2022, teacher Maureen Roa took what she'd learned back to her school.
We started with a cracked, barren schoolyard at Prinses Amalia Basisschool. No soil. No precedent. No certainty it would work.
It worked.
2023 – Growing Roots
I made it official. Living Soil Aruba was registered — not because I had a business plan, but because the work had already begun and it needed a name.
That same year, then-Minister of Nature Ursell Arends asked me a question I wasn't prepared for:
Could you do ten more?
I had done one.
"I've never done it. But I guess I can."
That answer became ten food forests at primary schools across Aruba, in partnership with the Minister and Santa Rosa. The schoolyards were waiting. The communities were waiting. The soil was waiting.
We started planting.
2024 – Expanding the Forest
The planting became tending. I learned that starting a food forest is one thing — keeping it alive, keeping people connected to it, that's the real work.
All schools got deeper support. Not just maintenance — education. Community. Showing teachers and caretakers that the garden wasn't mine to manage. It was theirs to own.
Six more food forests followed. Community foundations, a high school, government land. Each one different. Each one asking something new of me.
Seventeen locations. The network was real now. And so was the question underneath it all:
What happens when it needs to carry itself?
2025 – Deepening the Work
This year wasn't about planting more. It was about going deeper.
I spent time in conversation — with permaculturists around the world, with communities on Aruba, with anyone asking the same questions from different angles. In November I traveled to Curaçao for the Islanders at the Helm conference. Aruba's story landed differently when told from a stage in a room full of people facing the same challenges on their own islands.
At home, I shared my reflections at the University of Aruba — and that conversation led to something concrete. CEDE Aruba brought me on as lead consultant for a six-month EU and Holland-funded regenerative program. For the first time, the work had structural funding behind it.
The roots were deep enough now to hold something larger.
Or so I thought. The real test was still coming.
2026 – The Inflection Point
The CEDE program ended March 31st. No active income since. Two major proposals submitted and waiting — a three-year contract with Santa Rosa, and a named partnership in a EU Horizon Europe project led by Wageningen University & Research. The kind of international credibility that takes years to build.
And then, in the middle of that waiting, something shifted in me.
I realized I had built a system that still depended too much on one person. Me. That was never the intention. A regenerative system — in nature and in community — grows toward independence. The roots were deep enough. It was time to trust them.
In May I sent a letter to every school and organization in the food forest network. I told them: the doors are open. The contacts are there. The knowledge exists here on this island. Walk through.
This is the inflection point. Not an ending — a different kind of beginning.
Living Soil Aruba is what I built. Living Soul is what I am becoming.
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