Gloriana Brenes Gonzalez in Costa Rica Southern Caribbean is president of an organization that is empowering women to scuba dive with a purpose

Gloriana Brenes Gonzalez, diver and President of the Community Diving Center Ambassadors of the Sea is teaching women and girls lo dive in search of unknown Storie at sea, but also to delve into their own identity so as to know themselves and ancestors.  This is her own story as discovered by herself in the process: ¨The grandchildren of pirates are alive and kicking here in our communities, only they no longer have an eye patch or a wooden leg. In my family by my mothers side, there was a great-great-grandfather who was called "Tata Pinto" and who had been a Portuguese pirate. We know this because my grandmother Julieta Pinto wrote a book about him. But, what has surprised me the most is that, on the other hand, that of my father, there is a fact that nobody knew in my family. They always called me  ‘la negra’o‘ la negrita ’. I went to live in Puerto Viejo and then to Manzanillo and my dad always shouted "Negrita, come to eat". Everyone was watching him weird. At the time I heard people tell him  "you know he is white, why call her that?." They always bothered me about that also but I liked it. My dad really likes history, knowing about ancestors ands do on. So one day he discovered in some very old files that appear in Chilean writer's Tatiana Lobo's book, ¨Negros y Blancos, Todos Mezclados¨that in my family there was a family member who owned enslaved Africans here in Costa Rica  and that at the time of the death of his wife, she had asked that all slaves be released. That ancestor freed the slaves but  married one freed ensalved woman.  And from those ancestors I come. I love the Caribbean, I love Reggae and I love knowing that great granddaughter of a pirate and also of an African woman."

In training youth in scuba diving in order to search for the identity of  sunken ships in the Cahuita National Park, she highlights that those stories are very much a part of us even if we do not know it at first.  She believes that when we ask the elder about the oral stories in our lives and the life of the community, we discover much more that the identity os ships. ¨We discover who we are in the deepest roots, ¡just like the ships in the deepest ocean.

Resident in Puerto Viejo and president of the Community Center for Diving Ambassadors and Ambassadors of the Sea and currently studies the second level of community underwater archeology of the Nautical Archeology Society (NAS) in oder to teach children and youth to scuba dive. She has been coordinator of the 2017 Expedition Galions and Other Ships that is seeking to discover the identity of ships in a community initiative that has invited specialists to train the youth to do so. She is a scuba diver certified by PADI in Open Water, Advanced and Underwater Rescue, in addition to the specialized Shipwreck Monitoring. He was a presentation panelist at the UNESCO Seminar in Costa Rica “Safeguarding the Underwater Heritage” on June 27, 2017 at the Legacy Seminar in the South Caribbean Sea, 2017 in Cahita, organized by the University of Costa Rica, Caribbean headquarters, ASOPESCAHUI and the Community Diving Center. He coordinated the first Monitoring and Capture of Lionfish with ASOPESCAHUI and saves SINAC parks in the Cahuita National Park in 2017 and coordinated the Center's participation in the massive plastic and garbage cleaning campaign in the Parismina lay. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyM7d4KK-Qw&t=271s
http://escuelabuceocaribesur.blogspot.com/2019/10/underwater-vision-2020-cultural-and.html