WITH A CHECK TO BUY THE NECESSARY EQUIPMENT, ROTARY CLUB OF BONAIRE HELPS WITH THE DIGITALIZATION OF THE ORAL HISTORY OF BONAIRE

Rotary Club Bonaire gave substantial financial help to FuHiKuBo, the Bonaire Historic Cultural Foundation, so that now this foundation can start with the digitalization of a large amount of audiocassettes containing interviews conducted in the 1980S and 90s with the elderly of Bonaire. In the meantime many of these elderly have passed away and these recordings were in danger of getting lost, but will be rescued and saved now with help of the digitalization technology.

During the mid-1980s, Arthur Sealy and Bòi Antoin started interviewing the elderly/old people of Bonaire. The themes were navigation, Simadan, Maskarada, and these provided a great amount of audiocassettes with recordings of stories about the history and culture of Bonaire. Bòi Antoin continued this work with Max Sint Jago, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago.

Next to these interviews there are also many audiocassettes with interviews that other investigators have done with people of Bonaire. Among these investigators are Pater Brenneker, Ellis Juliana, Rosemary Allen together with Angel Salsbach and other staff members of AAINA. (Archeological Anthropological Institute of the Netherlands Antilles). At the end of the 1990s Els de Haan renewed a large amount of these recordings and brought them over to new audiocassettes. The original cassettes were sent to the National Archive in Curacao. With the advances in technology it was necessary to digitalize these recordings.

Recently FuHiKuBo requested financing for this project to Rotary Club Bonaire. Following the request, Bòi Antoin was asked to give a presentation to the members of the Rotary Bonaire, where he explained why this project was so important and how it would be carried out. Three weeks after the presentation Bòi received an invitation and a check to buy the computer and accessories to begin with digitalization of the many recordings of these numerous audiocassettes. This work will take about two years because of the large amount of data.

On behalf of FuHiKuBo, Antoin thanked all the members of the Rotary Club Bonaire for the support of this important project. He also explained that he makes use of volunteers and also people that have received community service sentence to do the work.