Natalia Pak (31) sits behind two prepackaged sandwiches at a table in hall 7 of the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht. It’s Friday morning, a quarter past ten. Her state of mind: ’50 percent scared, 50 percent happy.’
She slept here last night, on one of the hundreds of camp beds that are lined up here in rows of many. Her husband Khaled (35) is also there, as is their 11-year-old son Ramsay, who played football in Kyiv at FC Lokomotyv.
They arrived here on Thursday evening, she says, after a week’s journey. Natalia, whose grandparents came to the Soviet Union from Korea, displays photos of her work at a Korean cultural center in the Ukrainian capital. And of the plants she loves so much, plants she had to leave behind at home. Khaled, born in Egypt, says that he exported wood briquettes to, among other places, the Netherlands.
And now they are here themselves. To wait until they are assigned a place where they can live temporarily.
Worked in with flying speed
Such distribution issues – which refugee goes where? – are handled here out of sight. Behind a black screen in the corner of hall 7, four tables have been pushed together. Employees of the municipality of Utrecht call around there all day long, after which they bring good news to waiting refugees.
Yvette Lanting (29) is looking at registration number 9881670 around half past eleven, the anonymized file behind which Natalia and her family are hidden. Lanting, employed by the project office of the municipality of Utrecht, is working here for the first time today, as many people are trained with flying speed. This is her first case.
When looking for accommodation, the employees have two options. They can try to place a family via the Utrecht Security Region (VRU), which has an overview of the approximately one thousand places that the municipalities in the region have arranged in hotels, holiday parks and renovated office buildings. Or they can look for a host family in the region through the diaconia – the joint protestant churches.
Because the VRU’s places have almost all been filled, Lanting tries it through the diaconia. She scrolls through a list detailing the host families’ characteristics: location, family composition, number of beds, languages spoken, and more. Soon she comes across a family with room for three. She decides to link this to registration number 9881670.
To do this, she searches for the personal data associated with the number in another system – all of this in accordance with the privacy rules of the GDPR – after which she manually enters those data into a form provided by the parish.
‘I made a proposal’, she says a moment later to a colleague next to her. ‘And then they’re going to call me later?’
‘That’s right,’ says the colleague. ‘If all goes well within an hour and a half. And then we arrange a taxi. Unless those people want to come and pick them up themselves.’
‘Mayor’ of the village in the Jaarbeurs
Halfway through the morning, hall 7 of the Jaarbeurs starts to buzz like a small village, with the arrival of more refugees.
At the back of the hollow hall are a few hundred camp beds set up two by two. In addition, a few shower units, a doctor’s post, a test street and a vaccination counter. There is a counter with coffee, soup and sandwiches. Tables where all that can be consumed. A play corner full of toys. An empty area where volunteers play football with the children. A giveaway shop with second-hand clothes. A Ukrainian Orthodox altar with folding chairs in front of it. And a charging point for phones and tablets.
The ‘mayor’ of this village is Henri van Maanen, although he calls himself project manager registration and reception. Van Maanen (51) was flown in by the Security Region two weeks ago to help prepare this hall for the arrival of 130 Ukrainians. They were already on the train. ‘There was nothing here yet’, says Van Maanen. ‘No beds, no laptops, no electricity. Only the Wifi of the Jaarbeurs.’
The municipality of Utrecht, with the help of the Red Cross and the Security Region, arranged beds, sanitary facilities and food in one night. Refugees could register at a table with one laptop. An employee there then called hotels and taxis. They also recorded data from private individuals with sleeping accommodations. They provisionally tied supply and demand together. ‘Fortunately, not all of those 130 came’, says Van Maanen. “Most of them stayed on the train. They preferred to go to Amsterdam.’
‘We are building a bridge, but we are stuck over it’
That gave the people in Utrecht some time to scale up. More check-in counters, more laptops, more employees. Later they also ordered diapers, baby food and dog food. And a vet to check pets for rabies. That’s how it works in a crisis, Van Maanen agrees. First there is chaos, then structure.
Or, as Jaap Donker puts it: ‘We are building a bridge, but we are stuck over it.’ Because there is still a lot to do, says the director of the Utrecht Security Region, of which it was announced on Tuesday that about 2,500 reception places have been realised, about half of which are occupied. There are more places than the two thousand that the central government had assigned to each security region.
‘But we also have to prepare for the next phase,’ says Donker. ‘What do we do if host families ask us to take the refugees back in a few weeks? What do we do if people do not have to be cared for for a few months, but for a few years? It’s a chess game. As we make this move, we also need to prepare for the next moves.”
‘It’s cold and dark in here’
A quarter past twelve, telephone at Yvette Lanting. It turns out to be the matchmaker of the parish, who maintains contact with the host families. The family Lanting had in mind turns out to need some time to get things in order. They cannot receive Natalia and her family until the next morning.
“Okay,” Lanting says. ‘I’ll have to discuss that. Those people have already spent the night here. I’ll call you back in a minute.’ She turns to the colleague next to her.
‘I would prefer that they do not sleep more than one night in the Jaarbeurs,’ he says. “It’s cold and dark in here.”
Lanting calls the matchmaker back and then starts searching the system for another host family. And yes, at half past one she encounters two older people in De Meern. Once again, she transfers Natalia and her family’s data from one system to another.
Half an hour later her phone rings. “Good,” Lanting says. ‘Then I’ll keep looking for a while. Thank you!’ And then, to the colleague next to her: ‘That doesn’t look good in the system? Those people have room for three people, but that turns out to be one adult and two children.’
So on to attempt three. A couple in the Oog in Al district, where the children have already left home. ‘Then we’re going to try this one,’ Lanting says.
And again she types in all personal data.
It’s harder with a pet
So it has been going on here for over a week. The employees behind the black screen in hall 7 are looking for places to sleep for all people who report to the desk and can prove that they come from Ukraine. A mother with two daughters. Two sisters with three children. Two girls with two cats.
It’s not a lice job. There are employees here who have worked eight to ten days in a row, they say, often until 9 o’clock in the evening. Some are grinding at night. Did that one family still get a place?
They eat sandwiches here behind the laptop. The phone rings every few minutes. And when it’s quiet, there is always a new line in the colorful Excel sheet ready, a line that represents a family waiting on the other side of the black screen. The aim is for that file to be clean at the end of the day, so that no one has to sleep in the Jaarbeurs.
This is not always possible, especially if refugees have pets with them. ‘A boy came here with a pit bull’, says Henri van Maanen. ‘A treasure of a beast, but we couldn’t get rid of them. And so he spent two nights here on a cot, with that beast in his arms. Now he’s sitting alone with a man who has some land around his house.’
“I wanted to place people with a very small dog with a family that only wanted cats,” says an employee behind the black screen. ‘I thought, what’s the difference? But it didn’t work out in the end.’
Memories of the bomb shelter
What also complicates matters is that some refugees return to the Jaarbeurs after a few days, because they are dissatisfied with the accommodation. For example, they want to live in the city, or closer to family. ‘And then we have to do something about it for the second time,’ says Van Maanen. ‘Our organization can’t handle that.’
So they have become strict. People are only eligible for reassignment if a doctor confirms that there is a medical necessity. ‘For example, we had placed a girl in an accommodation where she had to go to the toilet outside. That made her panic, because it reminded her of the bomb shelter. We have looked for a new place for her.’
But, he hastens to say, in general the Ukrainians are immensely grateful. “Some come back here the next day to help.”
‘We have a match’
At 2 p.m. the phone rings again. Lanting answers and soon a smile appears on her face.
‘How great!’ she says. ‘We are in hall 7 of the Jaarbeurs. You can just walk in here and ask about me. Then I’ll make sure those people are there. I’ll just let them know that they will be picked up at 4 pm. Thank you, huh?’
When she hangs up, Lanting raises her hands in the air. ‘We have a match!’
“Nice, isn’t it,” says a colleague.
Shortly afterwards, Lanting slaloms between the tables full of waiting Ukrainians to the table where Khaled is seated. He calls Natalia over, who is walking further down Hall 7.
†I found you guys a placeLanting says.
That they will end up with ‘very understanding, smart and good-natured’ people, like Natalia later on de Volkskrant message, she doesn’t know yet. Nor is Ramsay allowed to train with a Utrecht football team for the first time a few days later.
†really?’, she says. †Thank you so much!†