External Thoughts

Text: Chendo Helmink

The theme of this Ideaal! Is “Ice to meet you”. When I heard about this I immediately thought about how ironic it was that this piece would be in this Ideaal!. That is because at the moment I can not meet you readers physically and the only ice I see is the ice in my drinks. The reason therefore is that I am not in the Netherlands at the moment but in the beautiful SouthAfrica. As Officer External Affairs I have to travel to several places which suits me very much. I grew up in a family with parents who love to travel.

My parents have lived in several countries around the world like Cameroon and Guinea-Bissau. When my parents got married in 1997 it took only a few days before my mother was already leaving the Netherlands for quite some time. In the end my parents got work in the Solomon Islands where they have lived for 2 years till my grandmother got ill and they decided to give up their life there and get back to the Netherlands.

Another two years later my mother got pregnant and during the pregnancy my parents decided that they wanted to travel to Turkey since travelling with a baby would get a little more complicated. So in some way Turkey was the first country where I have been outside the Netherlands.

Since that time I have heard endless stories about all the amazing places where my parents have been. This caused that already on young age I got a lot of passion for travelling. The list of countries in Europe which I have visited is almost endless and almost every

year I can add at least one country. In 2013 my parents decided that it was time that I would also see how life in a different continent would be. We went for 4 weeks to SouthAfrica and this time has definitely changed my life. We have met a lot of different people over there but a few people I will never forget. One of them is a woman we met in a small village where we went. She would guide us around some places. After half an hour she was already asking if we were still able to continue. Turned out she was already completely exhausted so in the end we have guided her back instead of she guiding us. Back in that village a lot of children wanted to feel my skin. They did not really understand what I was because they had never seen a white person. Another group of people I will never forget are some people from an institution for the disabled. The moment we entered they started singing the national anthem and to see all those people gathered just to meet us was definitely one of the most emotional moments of my life. This was already almost the end of our journey through South-Africa so we decided to leave some chairs and a football over there. The joy I saw on their faces when they could have a football is indescribable. During this whole South-Africa trip I fell even more in love with travelling.

After this trip I went to several European countries. Some of these vacations I went partying with friends and some of them I went backpacking, for example through the mountains of Ireland and Austria.

I enjoyed these trips a lot but a few years later my parents came up with a really adventurous plan. They asked me to join them to go to Uganda to set up a kitchen garden for a whole village in the north of the country. The plan was

that I would live there for a couple of months and become a maths teacher in Kampala (the capital of Uganda) the rest of the year. In December 2017 we went to Uganda to make agreements for the kitchen garden and to see where we were going to live the upcoming year. We started at Kampala the first week and afterwards we went to the north. We decided to take a little off road because we were too stubborn to follow the exact route from Google Maps. This resulted in getting a flat tire in the middle of the wild. It was already quite late, but we decided to change the flat tire anyway, knowing there were likely lions quite close to us. In the end we managed to reach the north and we waited for the next day to look where the kitchen garden would be. When we woke up we were shocked to see that the kitchen garden would not be any bigger than a small garden as a lot of people have in the Netherlands. This was by far not big enough to feed a whole village. We unfortunately had to cancel our plans of living there for the next year.

Two years later Covid started and as you all know travelling was not really possible during this time. Now that we can finally travel again we decided to go back to the beautiful South-Africa. I hope you all got too know me a little better and especially about my passion for travelling. I hope it gave you some warm feeling in these Ice cold times. Once I will be back it would be nIce to meet you all in the Abacus room!