Up until this point, I had been living here mainly as an outsider. My typical day was something like the following. Morning: wake up leisurely around 8:30, make myself breakfast, do some necessary errand such as buying groceries or do something fun like explore the market that happens twice a week in the town center. Mid day: eat lunch (usually at home), pack a dinner to take with me to the university library, start work around 1 or 2 pm, video chat with Em, work most of my day while my coworkers are also online, eat my packed dinner (often a cheese and avocado sandwich), watch the occupants of the library shift from the day crowd to the night crew, work a bit more until around 9 or 10 pm, go home, have a snack, go to bed. As one might imagine, it’s completely out of sync with the way most people here live. The upside of this is that the grocery store is rarely crowded when I am there. The downside is that this is making it quite difficult to achieve one of my main goals for my stay here – to understand everyday life in the Netherlands firsthand.

So I have been trying to find a place to volunteer. It has been a three or four week process full of dead ends.

My first thought was to find a community bicycle shop that provides space, tools, used parts, and helpful volunteers to enable people to build and maintain their own bikes – those must be all over the place here, right? I checked first on the Bike Collectives Wiki. They list a few maps of organizations. Between the map that is “probably more comprehensive for North America” and the one that is “probably more comprehensive for Europe”, there are zero organizations listed in the Netherlands. So on to plan B.

I asked at the public library if they knew a place where I could volunteer and help people learn how to maintain their own bicycles. The fellow I spoke with was helpful in a way that seemed as though he would much rather be doing something else, and he didn’t know about any organization of the sort, but he did tell me about a website that listed many local volunteer opportunities, and he told me that they were having a volunteer fair soon. So that was something.

I thought it would be more direct to ask someone who knew about bicycle-specific opportunities, so I asked at a bike shop in the town center. The guy behind the counter said “yes, there is a place like that in Delft!”. He pulled out a map and gestured that it was in an area just off the map (which happened to be right near my apartment). This sounded perfect. I asked him if he had the name or any contact information for this organization, and he said no – he couldn’t remember the name. I searched in the area on Google Maps, but I was not hitting the right search terms, so I was having no luck.

I asked Florian, my housemate, about where I might find an organization of the sort. He said, “yes, there is one right near here!” He was also able to remember the name and send me a link to their website. It was called Doel.

I called the number listed on their website. The person who answered the phone transferred me to another number. The person who answered there said I needed to speak to the volunteer coordinator and gave me her name and direct line. I called the direct line. It rang for a while and automatically redirected me back to the person who transferred me. She said I should call back the next morning. I called back a couple of days later. The phone rang for a while and redirected me to another line. The guy said that h should talk with the same person I was trying to reach and gave me the same number I called. I told him that I just called that number but got redirected to him. I asked,

“This is the second time I have tried to call so-and-so, but I am having a hard time reaching her. Can I send an email or something?”

“No. You must call.” I was about to ask him what this volunteer coordinator’s hours are so that I might have a better chance of reaching her, but he had already hung up.

I called again and spoke to someone else. She said I should talk to the same so-and-so who I have been trying to reach, but she gave me different phone numbers – one office number and one mobile number. I called the office number, but there was no answer. I called the mobile number, and I got through to her! She said that she would talk with the coordinator of the bike shop and have him call me back.

This was turning out to be the ultimate “I’m sorry, but our princess is in another castle” situation.

The bike shop coordinator called me back, but I didn’t answer because I was working. He left a message in Dutch. This was another sort of challenge – to translate at least the number he said to call back. My friend, Alex, suggested to look at the caller ID, which was brilliant. I called back the number that showed up in caller ID, but there was no answer. Also, I had deciphered part of the numbers from the message, and they didn’t quite match up.

Side note: numbers 0-9 in Dutch are actually fairly easy. Each digit sounds quite close to the equivalent in English. However, the thing that is tricky is two-digit numbers. People say the digit in the ones place before the digit in the tens place. That is, instead of “forty two”, one says the equivalent of “two forty”. Also, when people write phone numbers here, there seem to be a few conventions for how to group the digits. One is to group them in two-digit pairs.

In the voicemail, this guy left a series of two-digit numbers. They actually all seemed to be the same as the caller ID number, except for the last two digits. It was something that sounded like “sessentertich”. I had no idea how to spell that of course, so I went to Google Translate and played audio samples first for the translation of “thirty seven” – “zevenendertig”. That was one too many syllables, but the “dertdig” part was there, so I knew it was “thirty” something. I listened to the translation of “thirty six” – “zesendertig”. Bingo. I called that number, and I was elated to recognize the voice of the guy who answered as the same one in the voicemail I had just repeated about eight times. He said that I needed to make an appointment with the person who actually runs the bike shop (the guy speaking was just filling in), but this person was actually on holiday until the 24th of September. So that was a bust since that meant there would be only about two weeks between when this person returns from holiday and when I return home. I asked if there was another similar organization with which I could get involved. He said yes – a place called “Stunt”.

I looked up Stunt on the interwebs and found their website pretty easily. I was concerned that it might have been spelled a different way, but that was it. The process was much smoother with them. In this case as well, the person I needed to talk with (Hein, the executive director / program director / sales director) was on holiday, but he was back the following week, and he called me on his first day back. I then met him and got a nickel tour of their facilities and a very informal interview.

Stint’s objective is to work with people who have been long-term unemployed and help them develop the skills and confidence they need to successfully re-enter the workforce. They have an impressive variety of facilities in which the participants work: a bike repair shop, wood shop, sewing room, computer repair closet, screen printing setup of some sort (I only saw a few screens but nothing else), and kitchen. They have four paid staff (Hein, the executive director and wearer of many other hats; Tom, the bike shop manager; the receptionist; and the wood shop coordinator who has been sick for a while) which seems completely inadequate given their scale. Hein mentioned that they get some funding from the government, but they also have some earned income from products that the participants help to make. They have a display of a few of them in the lobby.

Products for sale include:

• Delftse kratjes (“Delft crates” sporting the Delft tourism logo)
• stools
• wine cases
• combo wine bottle and wine glass racks
• cutting boards
• notepad clips
• wall mounted lights with marbles embedded in them
• a wood briefcase type thing
• a wall mounted faux deer head made out of bike parts
• used bikes
• pillows

Hein mentioned that they are looking for new product ideas, so that’s something that he was excited to have me working on. It’s a bit of a blank slate, but I’m planning on gathering more information about what has sold well and what has not, what their capabilities are, and what materials they have access to (from what Hein said, it’s mostly used material).

I showed up yesterday for the first time, and I helped to make some Delftse kratjes. More on the experience later. Most memorable for me was that I got to hang out with some volunteers and participants during their break (which is an informally coordinated event that seems to happen every hour). Now I am instantly part of a community of sorts. I thought the hard part would be earning my cred once inside the organization, but really the challenge was just finding the right castle.