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 Have bike will travel Students are beginning to drift back into town, clogging the bookshops with their reading lists for Art History and Unemployability (Comb. Hons.) Proving the Dutch can do anything with a bike, I spotted these intrepid housemovers while cycling back from the crèche. With a child perched on front and another seated behind, I snapped off this shot while straddling my own bicycle. 4 wheels bad, 1 comment to Moving house, by bikeIt might come as a shocking fact to learn that in the Netherlands hundreds of children, some as young as five years old, are living in the most primitive conditions, sheltering from the rain in makeshift huts made from disused wooden pallets and scraps of cloth they managed to scavenge from the piles of trash on the outskirts of town. Their junior slum sits in a muddy field by the edge of the new highway, without any electricity, running water or sanitation, apart from two porta-loos on the edge of the field. Twice a day, adult volunteers come round with large plastic kegs of pale squash for the children to rehydrate after working for hours heaving and hammering their wooden huts together. The children possess little else than a plastic cup and a hammer. And guess what? They love it! Once a week every year, in villages all over the country, children get together to build their own hut, decorate it, customize it as much as they like — they never stop tweaking it — until the last day, when all the huts are torn down, stacked into piles and symbolically burned in a bonfire. I went along for the first time this year with my two oldest kids and one of their friends. I had only intended to drop them off, but quickly realized that they were quite incapable of dragging the heavy wooden pallets across the field. So I stayed most of the morning, trying to stockpile enough wood before everyone else had grabbed it. It was clear that experience made a difference; some groups had ten people working together, throwing up three-storey structures within a couple of hours. It almost seemed as if it was a competition between fathers to impress the rest, and I suspect some had prepared the whole thing with autoCAD. I came across two of our T-boy’s classmates pushing nails disconsolately into the mud, having been left by their parents to fend for themselves, so I adopted them and our team swelled to six. It didn’t make a big difference, however, because none of them could hammer very well (“Swing it from your waist! Don’t tap it in front of your face!”); they quickly got distracted and drifted off to pick wild flowers and make hooks to hang their jackets. After three hours, we realized our grandiose design was doomed to failure through a lack of wood, so we did a quick redesign and managed to use the remaining pallets for a sloping roof. Inside, the children made a shelf for their cups and hooks for their hammers, and a hanging vase for the flowers. It’s these details that count, not the walls. Scenes from the slums (click to view)
3 comments to DIY slum
Keep those wagons rollin’ … Life is rollin’ on chez les Bacon — school’s almost out for summer, my contract at the university has been extended for another year, baby Didi is up and walking, and we interviewed a woman last night to come help clean for us, which of course meant we spent a mad hour tidying up before she came so she wouldn’t be frightened off. On the work front, I see that a big translation I did recently on child witches in Africa has made the news. As with many of the texts I do for UNICEF, it produced very mixed emotions: on the one hand, it feels good to contribute to improving the lives of the kids; on the other, their lives are just so goddamn miserable, and people can be so extremely cruel and sadistic that I sometimes felt physically disgusted. Meanwhile in my day job at the university, I’m alone in the office, having opted to push my holiday dates back to better match our oldest two kids’ break (the summer holiday is staggered in the Netherlands over three different periods to reduce the mass exodus in August). The IT people have “upgraded” (sic) our system to Outlook and Office 2010, so I’ve spent the first hour reinstalling my own apps. If you consider we have upgraded from using Novell for our email, then you will understand that we are running about five years behind the cutting edge. Now, everything seems to have stopped running … maybe I shouldn’t have tried to install Adobe CS4, Flash Player, VLC player, and 17 Firefox add-ins at the same time … Back to work. Rawhide! The northern province of Friesland is considered to be on the outer fringes of the Netherlands, with its own language, cows, and … weirdness. Proof of just how weird was the following news story from last night:
Reactions among the Dutch were surprise (What about the smell?!), amusement (Only in Friesland!) and cynicism (They were just happy to keep getting his dole money). I wonder how the story will be perceived abroad. 2 comments to Family lives 4 years with dead brother
Last night’s news was dominated by coverage of the Dutch royal family’s visit to our proud little city on Queen’s Day (Koninginnedag). Security was ratcheted up to DEFCON 1 as a result of the car attack on the family during last year’s celebrations in Apeldoorn. Mr B went into town with our oldest two, and had a hard time getting near the market place. Hundreds of police had been bussed in to block every winding lane in the city centre. And those who had gotten through were corralled into pens that prevented them from following the royalty after they walked passed. The TV news showed a couple of vox pops where By the time I got there — children #3 and #4 have overlapping naps which take up a large part of the day — the royals had left, as had most of the visitors, which just left lots of police officers standing around.  No loitering!: Police ambush squad spring into nonchalance as suspect approaches, the only person not wearing orange on Queen's Day in the Netherlands. Going back to the news last night, the final item caught my attention: it appeared to be a very realistic first-person shooter game, à la Modern Warfare 2, with commandos rappelling from a helicopter onto a ship, and stalking round corners and obstacles looking for targets. In fact it was a video that had just been released by the Dutch Ministry of Defence and showed Dutch marines storming a cargo ship that had been hijacked by Somali pirates. The images were captured from a helmet camera, with a viewpoint that put the viewer in the thick of the action. It was a striking example of how game technology has permeated our perception of events, a contemporary case of anti-mimesis, as described by Oscar Wilde: “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” See for yourself. By the time I saw the news round midnight, the video had already been blogged and a rough translation provided for the team leader’s commentary:
The team leader adds that the crew gave them a round of applause, “They were really happy to see us.” I bet. |
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Hey,
I just wanted to let you know that I have been reading for a a couple of days and I would like to sign up for the updated feed.