You didn’t immediately understand what you saw. It concerned two people, a man and a middle-aged woman, who opened plastic garbage bags on the sidewalk along a busy street in the center of Amsterdam.
That happens more often, but now it caught my attention because they worked so systematically. It involved an impressive mountain of at least twenty bags that were opened one by one and thoroughly searched. They worked at a fast pace, not together on one bag, but separately. Everything happened in silence, there was only the sound of bags falling to the floor after examination.
Many passers-by didn’t seem to notice it, they walked past it as if it were a daily scene. I lingered longer, wondering if the man and woman were looking for something special. The contents of the bags were diverse: many food remains, but also loose objects, including, curiously enough, numerous half-used toilet rolls. But after a while they turned out to be looking for something completely different: plastic bottles, large and small. They were stored in a separate bag.
This part of the sidewalk was in front of a hotel, I saw when I walked across the street. Occasionally a man from the hotel staff would come out and place a plastic bag next to the other bags. He didn’t give the man and woman a glance and immediately walked back.
The waste had to come mainly from this hotel, which solved the mystery of the toilet rolls: guests do not want to find a half-used toilet roll in their room. The large number of plastic bottles was now also explained – there is a lot of drinking in such a hotel. Poverty makes inventive: the man and the woman will have noticed that they could earn the deposit here with which they had to try to live.
How much deposit would they have earned in this place? They worked intensively for more than half an hour; suppose they found 50 small and large bottles. You get 25 cents for a large bottle, 15 cents for a small one. I suspect (and fear) that they will have made at most 15 euros from their dirty job – an amount that they also had to share.
Earlier I saw a man in the city center with a kind of awl frantically searching for usable items in waste bins. He, too, must have mainly been looking for bottles.
In my column I recently described how a young woman with a baby in a pram begged on the metro from Kraaiennest station in Amsterdam-Zuidoost, a scene that I mainly knew from Roma women in Paris, although they have previously held the baby in their arms. then in the car. A reader wrote that this must have been a fantasy of mine. I wish it was true. I was reminded of George Orwell who was already in 1933 Down and out in Paris and London wrote: “But the trouble is that intelligent, educated people, the very ones who should have broad views, never associate with poor people. Because what do most educated people know about poverty?”
Those educated people will also be increasingly confronted with raw poverty in apparently prosperous cities such as Amsterdam, where many wealthy tourists and expats roam. The gap between rich and poor is growing rather than shrinking in such cities.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 30, 2022