Overview

We are in Holland. I came two weeks before the rest of the family so I could find an apartment, arriving on Thursday, August 14th. The first few days were discouraging: I looked for a place in the Leiden area but didn’t have any luck. Housing agents don’t work on Saturday, so I spent that day at the Stadsarchief Amsterdam. I spent my nights at a terrible hostel, dirty and loud, far from the city’s centrum—and not very secure. (I had to belt my backpack and duffel bag to the bunk bed every night, then snuggle down close to them so I would wake up if someone tried to take them.) On Sunday I found my way to the English-speaking branch in Leiden, which Kim and I had decided to attend, if at all possible, and that’s when things began to change. After Sunday School a brother named Mark Gunderman invited me to lunch. He and his wife, Debbie, then invited me to dinner and finally just to stay with them for the ten days before Kim arrived. They have a nice home in Wassenaer—the Beverly Hills of Holland, as Bro. Gunderman put it—with a large, empty bedroom in the basement. I now had a comfortable bed, a TV, an internet connection, a shower to myself, a pantry full of chocolate and other good things, and a kitchen that the Gundermans said I had to visit regularly. Bro. Gunderman is a very good cook and made something delicious every night, including ribs. Once they even took me out for Italian. After I found an apartment, they showed me where to buy used furniture online, drove me around to look at it, took me to do the other shopping I had to do, gave me food from their own cupboards, gave me some other odds and ends that our apartment lacked, helped me rent a truck, went with me to take the furniture apart and load it, drove the truck back after midnight, and bought a bouquet of flowers for our kitchen (so Kim would feel welcome). The elders quorum and young men also helped with the move. A sister with a mini-van took me to pick up Kim and the kids at the airport when they arrived, then called her husband at work when there wasn’t enough room for us and all the luggage. (He soon arrived with another car.) The Relief Society president brought us dinner the first night—chicken casserole and homemade strawberry tarts—and two days later arranged for rides to and from a primary activity, which is no small thing in a branch where members live in different cities. Finally, as if all of that weren’t enough, this week someone offered us a car. I’m not really using it, she said; and you need it more than I do.

There may be few members of the church in the Netherlands, but clearly, they are angels.

Our apartment is in Rijswijk, just south of The Hague. It’s typically Dutch: One of many near-identical homes in a long, unbroken row, brick on the outside, narrow within. The downstairs is a long room with a kitchen on one end and a living room on the other. In the middle is space for the table. There’s also a small nook off the living room where we keep a desk, and there’s a tiny bathroom (water closet) in the entry. At the top of the steep stairs, covered in red carpet, is a hallway in the same ugly red. It opens up into two bedrooms, though they used to be one, I think. The owner used a large closet to break up the space, leaving open air above it and to one side, blocked only by a curtain and a thin cupboard (which I placed there myself). The upstairs bathroom is newly renovated with a separate shower and tub. The whole apartment is heated with two gas fireplaces, and besides the bathroom, it’s not in the best of shape. There are nails and holes in most of the walls, dark smudges on some. Of course at €895 (or about $1,350) we can’t complain.

The family is settling in nicely. Buddy and Mary are in school now, learning Dutch and adjusting better than I thought they would. They went bravely the first few days with only minor bribes. Mary did get “sick” then, but it passed quickly and now she goes again without any trouble, partly because they allow her to bring her Raggedy Ann doll to class with her each day. They’re in a Protestant school just down the street. Anna might start attending the pre-school there (we want her to learn Dutch too) and Kim helps out twice per week for 45 mins during lunch. It gives the teacher a short break and we get €7 a pop.

To help with their Dutch I ask the kids what they learned each day when we sit down to dinner. I try to give them various incentives to come home with at least two new words. I speak to them sometimes in Dutch, though not much yet, and we read Dutch stories sometimes at night. (Most of the time we read Harry Potter, volume 4, in English.) They also have a few Dutch cartoons already. Every Sunday afternoon we go on a walk, and that’s when they’ve been learning to count and to recite their ABC’s. I call “één,” and they repeat it, then “twee,” and so on up to twelve. They can both almost count to twelve now without help, and we’re through the first part of the alphabet, too. They’re very cute in their fluffy coats, walking in a line in front of me, calling out their numbers and letters.

Yesterday (Saturday the 20th) everyone came to Amsterdam with me. I’ve been going there most days to do my research, and Kim decided that she wanted to see the city. We rode the train in together, and on the way I explained to the kids why it’s such a great place, how it used to be the trading center of the world, how blue Chinese porcelain and tulips and other goods ended up there from so many different places around the world but became “Dutch,” etc. We walked around a bit and saw the canals, then Dam Square; then I had to leave them (to get to work). With another family in the ward they went to the Anne Frank House, and a few hours later, when I’d finished, I met them and we walked together to Rembrandtplein, where Buddy and Mary and Anna climbed on and around the metal soldiers. We also went to the Oude Kerk, which is being renovated, and of course as we walked to and from it, right through the Red Light District, we had to keep the kids somewhat shielded from the prostitutes and posters and so on. Mary later said that the church was her favorite: walking over the graves on the ancient stone floor, looking at the stained-glass windows from 1555. One of the windows depicted the Annunciation and Mary’s later visit to Elisabeth, which is why our Mary Elisabeth liked it so much, I think.

I don’t think we’ll take the car that that woman offered us. It was very nice of her, but the cost of insurance and road taxes and gasoline ($10 a gallon right now!) would probably be more than it was worth. We would mostly use it only on Sundays anyway, and it’s not too inconvenient getting to church without it: when the weather’s good, which so far has been most days, we ride our bikes to the train station, take the train from Rijswijk to Den Haag to Leiden, then ride again to the chapel. It’s quite a sight, five people on two bikes. We either go with Buddy and Mary on the back of mine, on my rack, and Anna on the back of Kim’s, or Anna and Mary on the back of Kim’s, Buddy on mine. The kids don’t complain, and we get good exercise. When it rains there’s a bus that runs right in front of our house and goes to the station. It’s expensive, though, so we try to stick with the bikes.

As for my research, it’s coming along just fine. So far I’ve spent time in the National Archives and the Stadsarchief Amsterdam, mostly the latter. There are so many records I have to go through (not just in those but in other archives) that I’ve resorted to taking pictures for now. I already have thousands of them. I spend about an hour each evening and all day Monday, when the archives are closed, going through my photos one at a time, adding names to my database and other info to my notes. Maybe after I’ve taken enough pictures and have a good enough grasp on just how much there is for me to read and digest I’ll just be able to read. For now, though, with so many places to go and so many collections to see, I worry that I’ll run out of time. Ultimately I’ll probably have to go home with lots of undigested material and go through it all in the summer/fall of 2009.

Tonight before Mary went to bed she read for about 20 mins in Now We are Six—which was a surprise, since it’s all poetry. As I was tucking her in she asked if she could read a couple to me. She picked “The Friend” and “The Good Little Girl.” The second is about Jane, who is always being asked, “Have you been a good girl?” That was Mary’s favorite.

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