When I think about the core values of Influencers4good I imagine a collection of amazing humans who live a full life of purpose pursuing something greater than themselves. How each and everyone got there is the beauty we hope to discover and bring to light in these deep and personal conversations. We live in a culture of followers and likes and shift our attention to number-driven influence with shallow content. I am here to break that pattern for you and give you a space full of genuine people doing amazing things.
If you like them, do follow, because we need to harness the power of good.
When I first read about Cristina Zenato, a fellow Italian who like me has lived most of her life far away from Italy, I was deeply moved by what I read.
A professional diver who has lived and worked in the Bahamas for 30 years, Cristina spends most of the time in the water, deep under, either teaching, educating, or literally sitting on the seabed surrounded by sharks.
Stunning images of her shark dives have been circulating the web for a while, courtesy of her incredibly skilled husband, diver, and photographer Kewin Lorenzen. It takes a certain intimacy with the subjects, and I don’t mean his wife in this case, to be able to capture such spectacular shots. Cristina and Kewin get close and personal with their local shark population, and they wouldn’t have it otherwise.
Cristina comes from a sea family, recalling her childhood she said that while she cannot recall her first pair of fins and snorkels, she clearly remembers the anticipation of every summer when she would receive a new pair having outgrown the previous one. Her father taught her that: “there are no monsters in the sea, only the ones you make up in the head”, and this wisdom set her free to become a true explorer.
The journey from her first dive at 22 to a full-time Divemaster, educator, shark behaviorist, and conservationist was not a straight line nor a clear path. She set out to stay in the Bahamas working full time in hotels, as her studies prepared her for, and dive as much as she could as pure passion in the hope of befriending sharks.
Her diving skills and natural inclination enabled her to become a professional dive Master within 6 months and start thinking about that as a full-time profession.
She says youngsters always ask her: how can we do what you do?”, and there is no simple answer, it’s as long as the time it took to get there: 30 years, lots of love, disappointments, trials and error, losses and recoveries, it wasn’t a university course and clear path ahead.
She created what she is doing, making space every day, stealing time from other activities and commodities to dedicate more time to this all-consuming obsession.
This is not a job, it’s her life, her purpose and it comes with only one way of doing it: every day with one hundred percent dedication to it. It’s not a nine-to-five.
“There are no monsters in the sea, only those we make up in our head”
Cristina Zenato
Over the years the encounters with sharks created familiarity. While they once were shy and aware of this bubble-making creature, over time they became more accustomed, she belonged to the sea as much as they did, so it was no surprise when she told me that the very first time she attempted to remove a hook from a shark’s mouth, it was a natural act of compassion and care.
When I asked her how that started? Her answer was simple and immediate: “To me, it was like removing a thorn from a dog’s paw, you wouldn’t think twice about doing that, because you don’t want your dog to be in pain, so you would do it, naturally” she said. In fact, she insisted that she can’t quite remember the day it happened as it was not an eventful, memorable moment, it was more a necessity, something she had to do to relieve an animal from discomfort. She explained that people argue with her when she talks about “pain” that the sharks like other sea creatures, would not feel pain, but she explained that whatever that degree of discomfort is, or signal of distress that the receptors send to the shark, it is indisputable that it’s there, as it is indisputable that once removed, the relief is visible.
I know what everyone is thinking right now: yes, I would remove a thorn from my dog’s paw, but a hook from a shark’s mouth? Haven’t you watched all the movies? It always ends badly!
It’s one of the fundamental cores of Cristina’s job to educate about all things sharks and all things underwater.
There is a clear line between fact and fiction, and there is no one-size-fits-all. She is also not encouraging random people who have just started diving five minutes ago to venture and try anything of what she does. This is strictly reserved for seasoned professionals like her.
However, sharks are not the enemy, and she continues to advocate and educate to advance the understanding. “There are over five hundred species of sharks, the smallest one the size of a pencil and the biggest one the size of a bus, how can you have one answer on the behavior of all of them?”, and her educational sessions, speeches, programs are always focused on making sure knowledge prevent from a “one size fits all approach” that’s the biggest mistake we can make, about anything really, not just sharks.
Over the years she has established some trust with these sharks, dive-site fidelity (same sharks and same locations), she has affectionately given them names, Grandma, Floppy, Nacho are just a few, and she looks forward to meeting them when they return after the mating season, it’s the continuation of a lifelong relationship. When I asked her what the hardest part of her job was, she said “lack of closure, sometimes, all of a sudden one of them disappears, and that’s the end of that story and we will never know what happened”.
I understand fully how hard that must be, building a connection, a familiarity, and then suddenly, it’s gone, it’s very similar to a loss, and it cannot be easy to continue the work, the protecting, the hook removing, the teaching, the loving, and then every now and then accepting the loss. It does sound exactly like the circle of life above water, between us human animals, so I wonder why it is so difficult to feel compassion for a fish.
Cristina hopes to do more speaking, more teaching, access funds in support of her conservation work, and hopes to speak about her work at the UN assembly…. maybe we can collectively help her get there, meanwhile would be simply great to hear her voice at COP28 advocating for the oceans, the sharks, the protection.
listen to the full story on our podcast here.
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