There is a neighborhood shop in Vianen that you can visit if you no longer understand something. The shop is located in a primary school in De Hagen, a neighborhood with many low incomes.
It started more than twelve years ago, says Désirée Boersma, who mans the neighborhood store. Parents took more and more incomprehensible letters and forms from the municipality and government to school, where they asked the principal if he might understand them. The director received so many questions that he called in volunteers. From now on they were allowed to explain everything in a room in the school.
Until two years ago, when even the volunteers lost track in the overgrown forest of letters, provisions and other arrangements. The neighborhood shop is still located in the same space, but now professional social workers from the welfare organization Welzijn Vianen help people through the Dutch bureaucracy, supplemented by trainees from the higher vocational education program social-legal services. That’s how complicated it became to apply for benefits, or to defend yourself against errors in bills.
The two-year-old amalgamated municipality of Vijfheerenlanden, of which Vianen, Leerdam and Zederik are a part, subsidizes this. They can now also expand in other districts. Also in order to make letters and regulations produced by that municipality comprehensible. You see this in more places.
An Afghan woman with dementia comes to the neighborhood shop and makes it clear that she would like to pay her municipal tax every month by direct debit, so that she does not forget. The municipality no longer submits an authorization form with the assessment. That has to be done online now. But madam can’t do anything online.
So Esmee is going to call the municipality, tax department. They can only be reached in the morning ‘because otherwise they will receive too many questions to be able to do their work’. Anyone who gets so many questions might also wonder what could be done more clearly, so that fewer people call. To arrange a collection, for example.
Désirée sees large families who arrived here during the refugee peak of five years ago and were then insufficiently supervised. People who can’t read and write, have a low IQ or major psychological problems due to war trauma. She sees sky-high debts, because they do not know how an additional assessment works and when you will receive extra fines. In this neighborhood alone there are twelve large families, ‘about sixty people in total, the first children have already been removed from their homes.’
In the neighborhood store, you see brave people crawling into their shells, wary of systems that seem to work against them rather than for them. For example, a blond, pregnant woman of 25 who has been taking care of her mentally ill mother since she was a child herself. That mother has been hospitalized for years, but no institution has room for her. Due to all this, the daughter has now been declared unfit for work, is receiving trauma therapy and is now due to give birth in two months. In the meantime, her housing association threatens with sky-high bills for hot water, which, according to Désirée, can’t be right either. But try to prove a system error.
This woman is calm and determined to do everything better for her child. Désirée pours coffee, chats a bit, helps her find a lawyer who can object to the water bill. And then takes an extra hour to check all extra jars and arrangements. There are about ten of them, to help keep one head above water. But you do have to know about it.
‘A lot of organizations are looking for the poverty problem’, says Désirée, because the target group keeps quiet, often no longer trusts the government. ‘People who are stuck in bureaucracy are often happy that we are not part of the municipality.’
Vianen’s town hall has been renovated for millions, but if you just want to walk in, the door is often closed. The counters are only open a few hours a day, by appointment. Online, of course. Shouldn’t all municipalities, and preferably town halls, simply open an old-fashioned counter again for those who no longer understand? And that you can just walk in and ask how something should be done?
Well or not, says Désirée.
Because why would you trust a government that no longer takes the trouble to explain something understandable to you?