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My Story, My Roots
My Story, My Roots
Hi. I'm Rose Barros.
I left the Netherlands in 2007 without a grand plan. Just a feeling. Something needed to be different — and I needed to find out what.
In one of my first weeks working as a teacher here, a Dutch colleague pulled me aside and said:
"Don't be that macamba who thinks she knows better."
I never forgot it.
What followed were ten years of observation. Learning this culture — not from books, but by feeling it, living it, making mistakes inside it. I was born and raised in the Netherlands in my head. On Aruba I found my roots. I found my heart.
What I also found was Daniel. Born and raised Aruban, rooted in this land in ways I was still learning to understand. We started growing food together. I became curious, hands-on, hungry for answers.
In 2015 I received a cancer diagnosis — Neuroendocrine Tumors, a rare and quiet form. It stopped me and handed me the only question that actually matters:
What is my purpose for being here?
That question led me to soil. To community. To this work.
My roots in nature go deeper than Aruba.
I grew up outdoors. My parents encouraged me and my sisters to spend as much time in nature as possible — riding horses, building huts, ice-skating on frozen lakes. I spent countless days in the forest with my grandmother, walking her dog, playing hide and seek among the trees. At my other grandparents' place, we imagined we were kabouters — forest gnomes — living in their forest-like yard.
Those memories stayed with me. They grounded me, even when I didn't know it.
Years later, when Daniel and I started growing food together on Aruba, it felt like a return to that early wonder — but now with deeper questions. How can we live more in tune with this land? How can we share what we learn?
I began forming online communities. Organizing seed swaps. Inviting people into each other's gardens. Eventually I found my way to Permaculture — and then to Syntropic Agroforestry, which finally gave structure to what I had always felt in my body:
We are not guests on this earth. We are it.
I didn't end up here by accident. This work connects everything I care about — community, education, food, and the earth itself. It connects the child playing in her grandmother's forest to the woman standing in a schoolyard on Aruba, asking a teacher:
What if we tried something here?
The forest gnome grew up. She's still playing in the trees.
She's just planting them now.
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