The letterboxes of an apartment must rattle. Opens smoothly when you lift the hinge up, and when it has fallen again with a light bounce, go to the next one. From top to bottom, from left to right. “Simple and effective.”
Branch branch branch branch.
Ahmed Abdillahi (45) has been delivering the mail in Rotterdam at that pace for fifteen years. With his left hand, the elastic bands of his mail bundles around his fingers, a quick glance at the address, and on. Letterbox packages, government mail, magazines. And if someone happens to walk out of the hall, they are happy to have a chat. “Good day sir!” “Hey postman! Do you have a love letter for me?”
But the city’s new flats are called residential towers and it’s a different story there. Here, in the center, there are no people with ‘normal’ jobs like him, but cosmopolitans, expats and also real professional football players, who overlook the city from their high windows. Their mailboxes in the central hall, made of immaculate marble, subtly decorated with flower vases, are pleasing to the eye but do not always click smoothly. In fact, as a postman you can’t even just enter the most expensive towers. Then the central hall can only be reached with a special key, to keep out sleepers. You can request such a key from the building manager, but it is a lot of hassle for a postman. “I usually sneak up behind someone.”
Ahmed Abdillahi, who fled Somalia as a child, likes to get in touch with his fellow citizens – a good reason to be a postman. But in such towers a conversation is almost impossible. Residents do not walk out through the front door, they take the elevator directly to the parking garage. And you can’t even get in through their mailbox without an invitation. The ‘no no’ stickers in these towers are not stickers but pieces of plastic, placed as standard on each of the hundreds of mailboxes. No-no no-no no-no no-no no-no.
Abdillahi, dressed in a PostNL jacket, turns over his bicycle bag. “Michael Sandel calls it skyboxification,” he says, another bundle of mail in hand.
Thinkers
Michael Sandel, a fellow at Harvard, is one of the many thinkers who closely follows Abdillahi. Because above all he is someone who wants to understand the world, and tries to connect everything he sees on his daily rounds to a bigger story. He effortlessly recites quotes from sociologists, writers, poets and artists. And anyone who goes out with him will receive Bertolt Brecht via app in advance. “Think about this…”
For the ones are in the dark
And the others are in the light
And they are seen who are in the light
Those in the dark are not seen
Making invisible poverty visible is what Ahmed Abdillahi wants. For years he has been visiting debate rooms in the evenings to get involved in discussions about poverty and inequality. On his delivery rounds he speaks to well-known Rotterdammers about the state of the city. Writer Arjen van Veelen gave him a prominent voice in his book Rotterdam: an ode to inefficiency and now politicians would rather have their picture taken with him than the other way around. Abdillahi, ‘the most famous postman in Rotterdam’.
Now that he sees the spotlight on him, he wants to use it too. But how do you do that as a simple postal worker? Even more than cycling, Abdillahi runs through his city. His goal is no fewer than 25 marathons in one year. He wants to draw attention to the Rotterdam that his city council barely sees, but that he encounters every day on his rounds. And not the center of the city, where he Quote, the Green Amsterdammer and Sail Magazine delivers, but for Rotterdam South, his own neighborhood. In the shadow of the skyline, .
“Come to the right, across the bridge.”
Under the Willemsbrug, Abdillahi points to some sleeping bags near the pillars. Every morning he cycles past here and there are four people lying there. “Always the same.” He once gave one, “guy from Ommurde”, the telephone number of a street doctor friend. He has a foundation and could have arranged a hotel stay for him for a few weeks to relax. But the man didn’t want to. And there have been cuts in intervention care in the Netherlands, so the question is who still sees this man.
Photos Hedayatullah Amid / NRC
The postman is more familiar with such people. They do not seek help, out of shame, or because they simply do not want to. Patronization, Abdillahi knows, is a sensitive issue in the Netherlands. “Only if there is absolutely no other option do they turn to debt assistance.” He hears decent statisticians claim that poverty in the Netherlands is not too bad, but Abdillahi wonders: “Are these people visible in the figures?”
Coffee machine
Go straight ahead and turn left after the bridge. The postman stops at a PostNL collection point. Not much more than a garage box tucked away in a street. Music is playing, there are elastic bands everywhere on the floor and fellow postmen are fishing their new bundles out of the racks. “Hey, how are you?” “Good. Good,” says Abdillahi. He has to keep it short, his next neighborhood is waiting for him.
Soon his bicycle, a Cortina, sturdy model, is so full of mail bags at the front and back that he barely moves when he leaves. “I’m a professional,” he winks. Although he has sometimes fallen, including mail, “a passerby had to help me up again.”
Abdillahi has seen some changes in all the years he has been delivering the mail. The bicycle became heavier, because his neighborhoods became larger. The coffee machine disappeared from the collection points. It is often no longer possible to pee there, so he now goes to cafes for that. And he now has to serve the mail like a trained waiter, with three bundles on his forearm instead of one. These bundles have already been broken down in the sorting center into ‘magazines’, ‘letterbox parcels’ and ‘machine mail’, because the idea is that that is more efficient. “But heavier for me.”
During the last elections it was so hard work that vans full of Bulgarians were gathered at his sorting center to process all the voting cards.
PostNL has also had to make major cuts in recent years. The work became more ‘efficient’ and the facilities were cut back. In the sorting center where Abdillahi starts at six o’clock in the morning, everyone now works in a shielded area, surrounded by walls of mailboxes to prevent distraction. The canteen consists of coffee, crisps and biscuit machines, and during the last elections it was so hard work that vans full of Bulgarians were gathered at his sorting center to process all the voting cards. “I had never experienced that before.”
Abdillahi picks up his phone, zooms in on the Financial Glossary site and reads out loud. “The definition of efficiency thinking: The idea that everything should be expressed in numbers, money and returns. Where there is no longer an eye for the human dimension, the soft and immeasurable values in life.”
Abdillahi recently heard the scientific directors of two left-wing parties shouting that we are saying goodbye to neoliberalism, but he has yet to see it happen. Not only at PostNL, but in society as a whole, he sees efficiency thinking predominating. “A race to the bottom.” And that system is like a “giant tanker” that does not let you change course easily. “You cannot simply reverse the damage that has caused.”
Cans
Rotterdam South. The postman parks his fully loaded bicycle against the porch of a seniors’ apartment, ten stories high. Things are definitely going well in his city, says Abdillahi. He points to all the greenery between the flats: “When I delivered the mail here fifteen years ago, it was all still concrete.”
The outside has been brightened up, but inside, behind the front doors, he notices something different. If a package does not fit through the letterbox, Abdillahi has to ring the doorbell and he notices: “almost everyone is at home.” In fact, they are often happy to finally speak to someone. “Some only come out to do some shopping.”
Photos Hedayatullah Amid / NRC
As the letterboxes clatter – tock tock tock – another name comes to mind: “Tim Jackson, a postgrowth-economist. Ever heard of it?”
Jackson says: the definition of poverty is about more than money. Well-being, sense of community. In Rotterdam, Abdillahi saw community centers disappear, as did ‘looking after each other’. It happened that during his rounds he once saw a resident foaming at the mouth in the hallway. That man, he later learned, was not well liked in the neighborhood. “You wonder: how long would it have been there if a postman had not been there…”
Every day he delivers mainly the bundle of ‘machine mail’ in this district. Collections. Reminders. Pink letters
Check the time – “oh” – and Abdillahi soon gets back on his bike. Deeper into South Rotterdam. Here, in the four-storey flats, you hardly see nameplates at the mailboxes. As if residents would rather duck away from the mail. Every day he delivers mainly the bundle of ‘machine mail’ in this district. Collections. Reminders. Pink letters, “really a lot”, of which he did not know what they were for a long time. “I once asked an old resident. He said: that is an administrative fine if you do not pay your health insurance for a few months.”
“You know,” says Abdillahi, cycling past the buses, “if you don’t live here, you have no business here. Then you are blind. But as a postman you gradually start to see things differently.”
He points to the closed curtains, the peeling window frames. On the litter in the bushes. Pizza boxes, McDonald’s packaging, cups, vape boxes, flyers, candy wrappers. “As if the municipality only wants to keep the center really clean.”
Here in the South you can actually find everything on the street, except cans. They are picked up immediately. Not by the municipality but by countless passers-by with plastic bags. Abdillahi even sees elderly people clamber out of their mobility scooters to pick up such a can. “For fifteen cents, eh.” And when he once saw a Muslim woman collecting empty beer cans – “in our faith you are not even allowed to touch them” – he knew for sure: poverty is really persistent. “It changes you.”
New addiction
Poverty sometimes makes you do stupid things – Abdillahi should know. When he ended up in Rotterdam at the age of eighteen, far away from his family, it was difficult for him to find work. He became addicted to alcohol and khat. “Youthful stupidity”, due to a “destructive survival mechanism”. He incurred debts and had a bailiff follow him. But he remembers how one woman at the counter of an agency helped him combine two debts, “so my monthly payments were much less.”
Such people, he says, are what you need when you are mired in debt. But instead he sees a system that has little compassion. “The debt industry is unrelenting. And the government is not helping either.” Abdillahi can point to several addresses here in South Rotterdam where victims of the Surcharge Affair live. “They don’t just come out.”
Abdillahi himself managed to climb out of the valley by running. More and more, longer and longer; a new addiction. It gave him peace and focus. And now, this year, he is emptying his lungs every two weeks for 42,195 meters. Crazy stuff, he understands it himself. And that too in addition to a full-time job. Quite an achievement, but it causes him stress. He’s getting in a hurry, he notices. Sometimes I don’t even want to chat with passers-by anymore. There is hardly any time to recover. He must continue to keep the attention for “the people in the dark”: he has promised himself that. More kilometers, more spotlights, even more kilometers. More, more, more.
One of his philosophers might say: according to a neoliberal model. Because somehow, he realizes, this is how the entire society is behaving now. Run, run, run. “It’s unhealthy.”
Fortunately, the end is in sight. His last marathon, at the end of October, was number 22. In 3 hours, 27 minutes and 32 seconds, he crossed the finish line. And now he looks at the clock again. “I really have to move on, guys. My neighborhood…”
Photos Hedayatullah Amid / NRC
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