“What am I whining about?” That was what Daan Oolders from Assen thought when he met Mohamad Abdul Rahim, who had just fled from Syria. Oolders had done it, he thought, but he was struggling with burnout. That was unimaginable for Abdul Rahim. Now the two are in the theater together with their show Even Leven.
Abdul Rahim left his home country Syria nine years ago in search of safety. “I tried to cross from Turkey to Greece seven times. Only the seventh time I succeeded. I still can’t believe how dangerous it was. That’s still in my head.”
The lives of Abdul Rahim and Oolders crossed six years ago at Noorderpoort College, although their backgrounds differ considerably. While Abdul Rahim seized the opportunities in his new life with both hands, Oolders struggled with his.
“I lived in Roden, in beautiful Drenthe. I had a successful company, worked for the same organization as Mo, had a child. I was doing very well,” says Oolders. Yet he ‘doesn’t know it all’.
“Then I met Mo, that was a eye opener. I realized what bizarre, dangerous escape routes he had to take to get here and thought: What am I whining about?”
“I had never thought about what a burnout could be,” says Abdul Rahim about their differences. “That doesn’t exist in our culture. Although everyone has been through a lot, little attention is paid to the concept of stress.” According to Abdul Rahim, people in the Netherlands are too concerned about luxury problems. “I’m trying to tell people here, ‘Appreciate what you have here, come on. You’re whining. Compared to other problems, you have nothing to whine about.'”
And he also approached Oolders with that attitude, he explains. “Daan wanted to buy a luxury boat. To sail on the lake with his wife and children, and drink a beer. And he was complaining about all the paperwork he had to fill out for such a boat and where he could get it. which then had to be stored for the winter. Those kinds of problems. For me, a boat symbolized survival.”
The contrast between their lives and the lessons they both learned from each other are central to the theater show. That idea started with two TED Talks that the men gave together. “We had talked so often about what we could learn from each other that we thought: how great would it be if we could bundle our stories together. For example, we once gave a TED Talk in Veldhoven and Emmen. And then We thought: shouldn’t we just try to do this more often?
And so the idea of a theater show came up, in which they take guests through stories about dreams, diversity, choices and resilience for an hour, explains Abdul Rahim. His dream was his anchor: “My dream was to show myself that I can work and help other people. I wanted to become a teacher. In the area around Lebanon and Syria, not everyone saw my dream.”
“People said: ‘You want to go to Europe and become a teacher? That’s not going to work.’ But you shouldn’t listen to all the negativity. I am now a teacher at the International Business School of the Hanze University of Applied Sciences.” That resilience is inspiring, says Oolders. “Seeing opportunities and seizing opportunities. And also occasionally stepping out of the hustle and bustle of everyday life to live for a while.”
Dismissing burnouts as something minor is not the purpose of the performance, says Oolders. “It is a big problem here in the West, it does exist. But the purpose of our performance is to hold a mirror up to people, to make them wonder why they join the back of the traffic jam every day, why they get up .”
The performance will take place on May 17 at DNK in Assen. Entrance costs are three euros.