coconut picolés in little metal cups. As an accompaniment to dessert, Maria told us stories about how when my friend (an American born on Old Providence) was a little girl, “Ma-wie” would baby-sit for her and walk her up the long hill to her house after she was done at the store for the day. As the story goes, my friend would always lose an article of her clothing on the way up the hill and try and tell Maria, but with her limited language skills and Maria’s narrow grasp of English as a Spanishspeaking, French native, she could never quite get Maria to understand that she had left her shoe at the bottom of the hill until they reached the top. Having the opportunity to revisit the island, not for a vacation, but with the power to create something to give back to the community, was an amazing opportunity. With my connections on Old Providence
Photo by Orion Remaniak, Old Providence, Colombia
Photo by Orion Remaniak, Old Providence, Colombia
GPS strapped on, Aly descends the back side of the Peak
being mostly with islanders, I felt a certain loyalty to reflect the native culture and make my map available to them. Through its 480-year history, the island has been passed back and forth between Anglo-Caribbean colonizers and Spanish rulers, causing tension between English and Spanish speakers. This is especially true after the 1926 “Colombianization” campaign, which decreed it illegal to use English or Creole in schools or official documents until the creation of the new Constitution in 1991. Keeping faithful to the original inhabitants, I choose to use all English nomenclature with the “native” names for the hills, gullies, and bays. Over January-Term and February break on Old Providence, my most memorable experience was not the delicious tamarind popsicles at Maria’s or patacones (fried plantains) at Roland’s Place; it was not hiking to Far Enough and finding a coconut husk that grew without a coconut inside; nor was it the boat trip around the island to see the island’s majesty from the sea. My most memorable experience occurred my last night on Old Providence on the beach at Southwest Bay after the bonfire began to die down and the moon began to rise. All across the sand phytoplankton began to glow, like a Vermont field filled with lightening bugs transferred to a Caribbean island. I could draw designs on my arms and face with the algae and felt like a goddess for the seconds before they faded away. MG
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