MSF Holland colleagues

Tonight, Annedien and Marc hosted a nice reunion dinner with Joke and Simon. I met Annedien and Marc during my two years with MSF in Mozambique (1988-1990), where Marc worked at the Dutch Embassy. Annedien started working in our logistics and administrative team of MSF in Maputo and when I started setting up MSF Canada in 1991, Annedien was my liaison in the Amsterdam office of MSF Holland (Marc had returned to work at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Den Haag by then). A few years later (1993 - 1994) I joined Annedien (Director Communications) and Joke (Director Finance) in the Management Team of MSF Holland (my portfolio was HR & Training). Simon looked full-time after their two young daughters (he was a professor till then on Middle East studies) and trained to be an opera singer. They were two amazing couples to work and socialize with. 

On the way to Annedien, I passed the "Bloemen market" (flower market) along one of the "grachten" (city canals). I lived along that canal from 1985 to 1988 during my years at Fokker Aircraft. One of the city's landmarks there is this old clock tower of 1620...

People have permission to live in the so-called "house boats" along some of the city canals. 

One of the two "party places" in downtown Amsterdam is the "Rembrandtplein", where watching soccer games on large screens during World Cup games is always lots of fun. The Aussies seem to have established their own brand here: "Lousy Food and Warm Beer"....

Visiting Amsterdam again

Today I took the train to Amsterdam again for two days of visits with friends. I love the beautifully restored building of the central train station. Right in front of this station is a small restaurant where Mary and I had a wedding party one week after the formal wedding & party in Sparta, Ontario. The place has changed but I can still see us dancing the night away in this place 32 years ago.

Outside of the restaurant all the guests gathered when Mary and I arrived in a watertaxi, and they sang a welcoming song. It was such a nice surprise. We arrived in a small boat like this one...

For lunch I got together with Esther who was in 1993 and 1994 the babysitter for us when we lived in Haarlem (while I worked two years in the MSF Holland office in Amsterdam). She is now in her forties and the mother of three children while at the same time holding a job as Director for an arts organization. Her husband is a MD who - before their marriage - did also work for MSF. Esther visited us a few times in Canada, and we hope she will come again in the future. We ate in a place which no longer accepts cash; apparently becoming quickly more common in Holland...

Esther works in the northern area of Amsterdam, where we also had lunch. I had never been in that part of the city which has fast been developed during the past few decades. Behind the central train station are ferry boats bringing people back and forth (for free) over the river connecting Amsterdam with the North Sea (part of the Atlantic Ocean).

Family in Zeist

Berry is the youngest of the three children of my sister Ger and her husband Bert. He is 46 and himself now parent of three kids (14, 12 and 8). They live in Zeist, not far from Bilthoven. Berry prepared dinner and it was a coming and going of all the other family members from field hockey practices.

I have seen the kids Pleun, Cato and Hille now three times (in 2012, 2016 and 2022). Nice to see a few moments of them growing up. I hope some or all will be able to visit us sometime in Canada....

Fokker Aircraft colleagues

I worked as one of the 15 Airline Analysts of the Marketing & Sales organization of Fokker Aircraft from 1985 to 1988. Fokker then had about 15,000 employees with its factory near the Schiphol Airport. The Marketing and Sales organization of about 600 employees was based in a nearby office complex. Dick - left of me at the photo above - was my roommate and mentor. Teun - in the middle in the white shirt - was our team's Manager; the most "chill" manager I ever had during my career. Jan, Mel and Aad were team leaders and have developed - just as Dick - very interesting careers once Fokker went out of business in 1996. It was about 30 years ago I last met up with this group of former colleagues.

Aad picked me up and dropped me off in Soest in his Tesla. What an experience to drive such a fully autonomous car. Hands free, no longer a dashboard but instead a board computer...

The man who introduced me at Fokker was Pieter and I owe him for that big time. Pieter was one of the older brothers of my high school girlfriend Ineke (see a few posts earlier). I followed his example to start an engineering study, and 10 years later he convinced me to go for this position at Fokker. Last night I was invited by Pieter and his wife Titia for dinner. Their house is located in the middle of a local golf course. Many golf balls end up at their property. Pieter has by now collected thousands of balls which he carefully cleans and sorts per manufacturer. A rather unique hobby...

Pieter has become a true wine connaisseur. As always before when I visited them during the past 40 years, he opened a very good bottle, and we had a super enjoyable evening.

Webinar for Caribbean educators

Tonight, I gave a webinar on leadership in technical training institutions of several Caribbean Island states. I will never really get used to this virtual world, but this way of sharing knowledge and experiences is of course much better for the world's human footprint. Hopefully the 18 participants enjoyed my storytelling, and my examples gave them some good food for thought. Earlier tonight I had another dinner with friends from Bilthoven; photos in a post tomorrow...

Reunions in Scheveningen

Angelo was one of my travel companions when I met Mary in late 1982 at a train station in India. We had - with two other Dutch friends - travelled the Sahara Desert in an old VW minivan, seen some of Central Africa and had just started to traverse part of India. Forty years later we caught up during a walk along the beach of Scheveningen and got soaking wet in the rain. Angelo did spend time working and living in Japan, Singapore and China. During his almost 20 years in China, he met his wife, and they had a boy and a girl together. Three years ago - just before the COVID lockdowns - he took his family to Holland where they all (re-)integrated in the Dutch society. On his phone above he proudly shows off a photo taken after he ran a long distance run together with his kids.

On the second photo is his wife Julie, his father and his brother & his wife. We spend a few hours together catching up and sharing thoughts about where current technology developments might lead the world of tomorrow. Angelo graduated as a mechanical engineer who learned operations management practices during his career and currently is a professor in that topic at a college in Rotterdam. It was good to see him again after so many years.

Later yesterday we had a reunion with six of the seven colleague students with whom I was in a committee (in 1979) organizing a welcoming program for newly arrived students at the University of Technology in Delft. We had our first reunion in September 2019 after thirty years (during my last short visit to Holland before the Corona Pandemic). Anne Marjan (in between Hubert and Liesbeth) organized yesterday's get together again. The others present were Fred, Coen and Jos. Missing this time was Jan. It was again a fun dinner with lots of laughs.

I stayed overnight at the house of Coen and Anne Marie, where Anne Marjan joined us for a night cap before driving back to her home in Wageningen (towards the east of the country; she got there in a bit over an hour; the charm of living in this geographically small country). Another fun day passed.

Bilthoven to Nijmegen

My friends Rob & Marijke have a passion for sailing and spend much of their free time on a beauty of a sailboat, called "Jelle" (after a name in Marijke's family). It was very nice to spend time with them during this visit. I stayed over for the night at their place and the next morning (yesterday) the sights of their house across from the house I grew up in on the Palestrinalaan were just too tempting to not snap another few photos of. It was a beautiful place to grow up ...

I had another day of memory lane on the bicycle through my old home village of Bilthoven and above is a bike lane tunnel ("Het tunneltje" = the little tunnel) under the train line which crosses the village. It leads to the tennis club where I pretty much lived during the summers of 1971, 1972 and 1973 (when I was 15-16-17 years old and thought I would be the next Bjorn Borg, one of the top professional tennis players of those years; I peaked at 17 and it all went downhill from there with my tennis career).

This small membership club has (and always had) ten clay tennis courts and a nice small clubhouse. Clay courts were always my favorite: the slower court for the slower fellow that I am. And you have no idea how many hours during countless summer days I spend hitting balls at this practice wall. If I would get a dollar for each hour I spend with that wall, I would be a rich man ...

The tennis club is located in a nice forest area surrounded by a trailer camping ground and in the past also with an outside public regular swimming pool with a simulated lake kind of shallow pool with beach type sandy areas around it; a place where I spend a lot of time as a young kid and where I learned to swim (for the final level swim diploma they made us jump into the deep end with all our clothes on and then we had to swim 25 meters to the other end). The pool disappeared and instead there is now a small golf course with a fancy driving range. The golf course only has a few holes of short distances and - from what I saw - the average age of the players is around 80; clearly targeted to the retired babyboomers living in town ...

One of my old high school friends, Richard, invited a few of us for drinks at his place yesterday and here he shows me a nice photo of his four kids (ages 25 to 32). Unfortunately, two of our buddies had to call in sick, so it was just Richard, Paul and me who went for a dinner in a nearby restaurant. Lots of good memories and reflections that evening ...

And today in the morning again on the train to the city of Nijmegen - in the eastern part of Holland - to visit Monique and her family (the oldest daughter of my sister Gerrie). Monique is 51 and completed studies in architecture and nursing and worked in Rumania (volunteering in an orphanage), Kosovo (as a medic with the UN Peace Keeping forces) and Malawi (two years as a consultant in a countrywide HIV-AIDS prevention program). With her husband she cycled from Holland through Europe, Turkey and Iran to Uzbekistan. After all that excitement, they had three kids (now 15, 12 and 9). Talking about an energetic (or some people would say exhausting) life. At their house they have made a climbing wall, because they are all into that sport. Her husband Marco runs a travel business called "selfdrive4x4" offering adventure vacations in southern Africa. They took Gerrie and Bert earlier this year for a twee week camping trip through parts of Botswana.