Where's home?

(We’re back in the Netherlands, arrived last Sunday night after a not very eventful journey, although the children, and especially R., our youngest, proved quite a handful.)

Where’s home? A question we continuously ask ourselves. We’re curiously watching ourselves as we manage to root in three different places.

Brussels is definitely home. We have our house and were very happy there from 2001-2004. We will, after this and hopefully one more posting abroad, return there.

Our host country, too, has, willy nilly, become home. All three children are now at ease and happy there, and we’ve grown accustomed, even committed, to the country and its people, warts and all. We’re attached to our friends there as well as to the local members of our extended household. But of the three places we call home, this one will definitely be the easiest to move on from, as it is not an easy place to live in.

The third place, then, is Lith, Dutch author Anton Coolen’s ‘Dorp aan de rivier’ (Village on the riverside), where our cozy little holiday cabin is. This picture was taken yesterday from its kitchen window.It’s only 10 km away from my place of birth, Oss, where my mother lives. It is a nice paradox that, after having been away from it for more than twenty years, moving to Africa has actually caused me to call the region home again when we bought the cabin in the summer of 2004. I was pleasantly surprised to notice that I had an emotional attachment to the region, its polders, the Maas river, the Teeffelse Wetering and so on, places where I went fishing and biking as a kid and as an adolescent. I automatically and inextricably associate Dutch romantic poet Herman Gorter’s poem Mei with the polder landscape between Oss and Lith.

I feel a tingle when I hear authentic speakers of the local Brabant dialect, which is the dialect I grew up with. I never spoke it myself, even though I can imitate it pretty well and can sort of adapt my language to it (I managed a fluent "ennenu schup, heddedie ok?" a year ago in a Lith tool shop, when I sought to buy a spade). The decade I spent in Nijmegen (1984-1995), among a mixture of people from Limburg, Brabant and the town itself, blurred my distinctly Brabant accent into a broader Southern drawl that I still have.

We did a good thing when we bought the cabin in 2004, just before our departure to Africa. We thus made Lith our place of refuge for a long time to come. We decided that we, and most of all the children, needed a place they could call home throughout their youth (an advice that was also given to us by other expat colleagues).

All the above Blut und Boden stuff may sound a little tacky, but the emotion was and is real enough, and I feel enriched by it.

A few things that have struck me since our return last Sunday:

1. the strong Wassenaarian r-sound (*) that seems to be ever more fashionable among radio dj’s.
2. a giant golden Buddha right next to the highway in Amsterdam, a promotion for a new Buddhist broadcasting agency in the Netherlands, the Boeddhistische Omroep Stichting (BOS) (**).
3. Wouter Bos, the Dutch social democats leader, has published a book called ‘Dit land kan zoveel beter’ (This country could be so much better). That may be true, and his job as a politician he should look for further improvements. But it could be a lot worse too, see my next point….
4. in a snack bar, a sheet of paper from a regional volunteer organization for ‘terminal homecare’ asking for volunteers to come forward to accompany and help dying people and their family members. You can even get volunteers for that in Holland, that’s beautiful! Little by little I must have been lowering my expectations to the conditions I observe in my host country. Such volunteering there often results in predatory behavior. Isn’t volunteerism, like the absence of corruption, a measure for the degree of success of a society?

The cold feels good. It’s giving me more energy, and reminds me once again what a physical burden the heat and humidity of the tropics are, even if we have gotten used to it. One can just get a lot more done in a moderate climate.
Another sign that my old energy is coming back to me: I am seriously considering taking up studying again through distance learning. London University offers a MSc program in public policy and management with lots of solid economics, all very useful in a development context. I could do just one or a few certificates first. There seems to be more added value in spending the hours of the overtime I usually make after 5.30 pm on family life and a new intellectual challenge instead.

(*) A highly resonant, vocalized r-sound. Hard to explain, but a very distinctive sound. As I recall from my days in linguistics, the only thing that comes close to it is the Albanian rr-sound, like in Rröfte Enver Hoxha – Long live Enver Hoxha. It’s a phoneme not liked very much by Southerners, for completely socio-linguistic reasons as I happen to know from close childhood observation. At my very local catholic primary school, the local Oss dialect was the norm. Even I - with my distinctly Brabant, though Western Brabant (where my parents came from – proud to say that I can still do some imitations of that dialect too), accent - didn’t live up to the norm and was still considered a ‘stadse’ (city boy – a qualification that was enough to put one at serious risk of bullying - 'afslaan'). Those with the Wassenaarian ‘r’ were invariably ‘imported’ from the north, usually protestants, very often children of managerial staff in some of the more advanced industries in Oss (Organon, Akzo-Pharma). My primary school neighbored a public (non-confessional) one, and I clearly remember a catholic ‘raid’ on the 'protestant' children during playtime at least once. As far as I can tell, these sentiments have worn off, and a good thing they have!

(**) I looked up their website, www.boeddhistischeomroep.nl. They have only recently started, don’t broadcast a lot but get 4 millions euros in state subsidies, which have apparently raised questions in Parliament. One can download the documentaries they have broadcast before. One of those amused me. It showed a grumpy old Tibetan monk at a seminar in Amsterdam who declared that many Westerners were a little too ‘creative’ in interpreting Tibetan Buddhism, and that that was why he was at the seminar in the first place, to preserve the purity of the tradition. It was obvious that he preferred his calm monastery life to keeping New Age zealots from mixing Buddhism with tree-hugging and Madame Blavatsky…