Dole money

In Holland there used to be a time when you reported to the Work Office for a job, they would ask you....

Are you here because you really want a job or are you here because the Social Wellfare send you here?
If you`re here because you want a job, we`ll do our best to give you a nice job.
If you`re here because you wanna get on the dole, we`ll inform the Social Wellfare people you were here and don`t bother you anymore.

The latter group now spends its time in the park drinking an endless supply of cheap supermarket beer, wearing ragged clothes, never having accomplished anything in life and suffering of bad health.
indebted to the bank, behind with the rent, a queue of bailiffs in front of the door and neighbors constantly phoning the police with complaints.

This is Sesca, short for Francesca, one of my very best friends here in Amsterdam.
You see her here selling her handmade jewelry at the Leidsplein, the Square of Leiden, and you can find her here nearly every evening during the summer.
Sesca, thanks for 26 years of close friendship, all the modelling you did for me and all the laughs we shared, I hope there will be another 26 years of FUN in it for us.

Non-believers

In the days I grew up you only had catholics and protestants.
That was the way the world was and wasn`t talked about.
You didn`t talk to the protestants, and especially not to non-believers.

GoForthAndMultiply

My grand mother married a farmer`s son when she was 17 getting her first child when she was 18. she lived in a smal little community in the deep south of catholic Holland. Life was harsh in these times with the power of the church more influencial as the far away government in The Hague. Three months after her delivery the local priest would come over to the farm on his rusty old bicycle, dressed in his long black smock. He would ask her husband how come the wife was pregnant yet again. By the time she was in her early forties she had produced 19 children, looked haggard and twenty years beyond her real age.

Real Fear

My grand dad was a robust man with pitch black hair who in his early forties had fathered 19 children and was rumoured to have the strengh to knock down a horse with a single punch.
One dark night at the end of world war two he cycled home on his old crappy bicycle from Eindhoven to his farm near Valkenswaard when the allied planes came over to bomb the Phillips factories that the nazies had turned into ammunitions producers, with bombs exploding all around him he dove into a ditch where he stayed untill the first rays of sun.
When he got home and looked into a mirror he saw a ravaged old man`s face and his raven black hair had turned completely gray.
It was the night he learned the meaning of Real Fear.

Every friday night was payday for my dad and his brothers, cash in the hand as was usual in that time, in the bar in the main square of the village where their boss had a financial interest.
They would come home late at night drunk as skunks. It were the nights my MUM would be submited to really heavy physical violence while grand MA would sit in the back room quietly pretending not to notice.
Me and my brothers would be upstairs in bed pulling our pillows over our heads trying not to hear.

Reaction....

That feels like a painful memory... and I'm sorry. I can relate to the abuse of alcohol. I practice living in the NOW and realizing that the past is over. I'm free. Take good care. :) By Saharis, an Eyefetch friend and female

By Wannabe, also an Eyefetch friend
I was in the same boat guys.
Sandi is right it is over & for our own good we must move on.

AudreyHarwick, as well from Eyefetch,It doesn't have to be physical to hurt, I can remember pleanty of paydays my dad would forget to come home and to put something on the table. I am the oldest of nine so there were a lot of mouths to feed. I got tired of the crap and told him to leave when I was 14. It was hard on my little brothers but it was better than having my dad undermine the effort my mother made to keep us housed and fed.

It is one of the big reasons why I have always had a job and never depended on a man to "Keep Me". That doesn't mean I haven't had my fair share of men, it just means I have them for whats really important Love.