What am I learning about myself, being over here on sabbatical?

Well, I’m learning that I don’t like to ask people for favors. I like to be self-sufficient. Yes, it may be pride, but I also hate to think that I’ve inconvenienced anyone. I noticed this quite clearly about myself this past Saturday.

As I wrote in the Storage Unit post, we’ve got a furniture problem. Helping me to solve this problem has been a kind Dutch woman named Ina. Ina is an art curator, otherwise employed, so I know her time is precious. Asked by the Canadian expats who were here last year to help transfer their furnishings from their house to ours, Ina also looked at two apartments for us back in July and advised us via email about their charms and limitations.

Ina is the one who met us at the storage unit with the keys when we arrived. She’s also the one I emailed last week with a plea for help. Our two week window for emptying the storage unit was closing and my hours of navigating the Markplaats website (i.e. Ebay) and posting our ads on Expat.com had resulted in zero phone calls. Likewise, my phone calls to several kringlopers (i.e. Goodwill) had been unsuccessful–none of them were immediately willing to drive to the Hilversum Shurgard with a truck. Self-sufficiency was not solving my problem.

After reading my polite plea for advice, Ina called another second hand store and reported that she thought this smaller kringloper would pick up the stuff on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. This is still one week after the deadline to not have to pay another month’s rent on the storage unit, but it was incremental progress.

In the meantime, Ina and the manager of the storage unit also had another plan. When we were there in Hilversum in August, they recommended that if our two-week window closed, that I start a new contract for the unit in my name, which would reduce the rent to the promotional, first-month rate for new customers. When I called the company to set this up (from my office phone in Amsterdam), the receptionist told me that it was impossible. So, following Ina’s additional advice, I made an in-person appointment for 10 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Dutifully, I emailed Ina to let her know. She wrote back, “Do you need me to pick you up at the train station?”

Now, it’s a twenty minute train ride from Utrecht to Hilversum, and the storage unit place is two miles from the train station. It costs extra money and significant effort to wrangle a bike up and down train track overpasses and on and off a train. So, did I ask Ina to pick me up at the train station?

No. I didn’t want to inconvenience her.

Instead, I decided that the simplest thing was for me to bike to the Utrecht train station, park and lock up my bike, take the train to Hilversum, then jog from the station in Hilversum to the storage unit, knowing that the likelihood would be high that it would be raining. I would have to leave home by 8:40 to make the 10 a.m. appointment–on my day off with the kids.

“I like to jog every day,” I told her in an email.

So as I was jogging in the rain to the station, she passed me in her car. When I arrived at the storage unit, she was waiting for me with a glass of water. What followed was a lengthy conversation in Dutch between Ina and the storage unit employee.

“Did you understand us?” she asked me.

“No, not at all,” I replied.

Well, she went on to explain. Because I had called on the telephone in English, and phone calls are recorded for quality assurance, the employee had to follow the rules precisely, and she could not simply change the name on the unit and reduce the rate to the promotional level for me. “They don’t want young people storing their band equipment to simply change the name to a friend’s identity each month to keep getting the promotional deal,” she said. Understandable.

Nonetheless, all of my effort to get here to Hilversum was a waste of time, I thought. I conjured an image of what I was missing at home by being there: Steve and the girls, eating pancakes in a warm kitchen on a Saturday morning. I imagined reading books with one of them on the couch. My eyes started to fill with tears.

Seeing my distress, Ina offered to drive me to her house for coffee and then to the train station. I said (I hope politely), “Oh, just to the train station will be fine. Thank you so much.” On the drive to the station, I thanked Ina for being so kind to help us with the storage unit problem, when she was getting nothing out of it. (I still don’t know if a bill for her time is forthcoming.)

“I’m helping you because I know what it is like,” she replied, “to move to a new country and start from nothing. I have done it several times, though I usually knew the language.”

Ina then narrated her end of the phone calls to several kringlopers: “The woman said that there was nothing in it for her, but she could hear in the sound of my voice that we really needed help, so she took pity on us and will take the stuff to help us out.” Then she repeated her message to me, “When we landed in a new country, people helped us when we needed help. Now I’m helping you. The kringloper woman is helping us. That’s what makes the world go ’round,” she concluded, gesturing in a circle with her hand.

How, I wondered, do I thank her? Gifts? Time together over coffee? Is a smile of appreciation and a hand written card enough? And perhaps my inefficient trip to Hilversum wasn’t a waste of time. I let her see my honest feelings and my trouble, and she responded with compassion. It’s that compassion that is going to solve our problem, not my self-sufficiency.