‘Najwa, would you like to taste the soup?’ Jeroen van der Woude (65) looks questioningly at the stylishly dressed woman who recently walked into his house. In district C, a working-class neighborhood in the center of Utrecht. He has made a large pot of lentil soup, and wants to make sure he serves his guests something tasty.
Najwa Alshaar (56) stops peeling the cucumber and bends over the steaming pan. She carefully brings the spoon to her mouth. „It’s okay“, she says, to Van der Woude’s relief. He turns to the two men in his living room, who are having a heated conversation in Arabic. “Aren’t you helping?” he asks teasingly, pointing to Alshaar.
Once at the table, his guests (the main language is English) talk about their former lives. Imad Alsulaiman (35) was a civil engineer in Homs, Syria. Mohamed Ibraheem (31) worked in Bengazi, Libya, for a human rights organization and a political party. The Syrian Alshaar is a jack-of-all-trades, who completed several university studies and describes himself as “businesswoman” typifies.
They live in different shelter locations in Utrecht and do not know each other. Their experiences as refugees in the Netherlands are very similar. They feel insecure about their future, suffer from depression or panic attacks, would like to do something with their talents and try to follow the asylum debate as best as possible through translation programs and Tiktokkers. Such as last week, when the Senate rejected the Emergency Asylum Measures Act, which makes illegal stay a punishable offense, but adopted a dual-status system that makes a distinction between people who fled their country due to personal persecution and people who left their country due to war and violence.
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Van der Woude listens to their stories in silence. As a single man, he leads a secluded life, he says. He has enough of his parrots, Zazu and Lola, who are in love, and they just skim over the heads of his guests. Is the Arabic of a Syrian easy for a Libyan to follow, he asks Ibraheem. And how does it feel to see TV images of angry citizens in front of asylum seeker centers? Before his guests arrived, he said he would not inquire about trauma. “I don’t want to be nosy.”
In front of Jeroen van der Woude (right) in Utrecht.
Photo Mona van den Berg
The dinner is an initiative of Eet Mee, a foundation founded in 2009 in De Bilt that ‘brings people together through food’ through various projects. At Come & Eat, residents of Utrecht (emergency) shelters are invited to their homes for dinner with residents of Utrecht and the surrounding area. Van der Woude is one of approximately a thousand people who cooked for a refugee for the fifteenth time this Saturday.
Eet Mee’s projects have been awarded several times, including the Utrecht Tolerance Prize in 2016 and the GroenLinks Red Pluim in 2019. Last Friday, Annelies Kastein, founder of the foundation, became a Knight in the Order of Orange Nassau. “In a society that often polarizes, you are the one who provides connection. A major achievement and great social importance,” said Mayor Maarten Haverkamp of De Bilt.
Obvious
A day before the ceremony, Kastein said that she worked for years at the public library in Utrecht, where she was responsible for the Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Italian, Yugoslavian and Spanish collections. “I was told that it is so easy for me to make contact with people from different cultures. That was obvious to me, but not to others.”
Kastein decided to quit her job to set up a cultural organization agency. The Eet Mee foundation emerged from this. Initially, the goal was to connect as many people as possible from different backgrounds, but over the years more and more projects were created for specific target groups, such as vulnerable elderly people, students and therefore also refugees.
Guest recipients participate in Come & Eat for several reasons, says Kastein. Some are concerned about the growing intolerance towards refugees, others want to teach their children that there is more than their own bubble. Every now and then someone you wouldn’t expect comes forward. “A man said that he ‘voted for a certain political party’, had no interest in refugees, but still wanted to meet one. He was attending university and was surprised that his guests had an academic degree. That got him thinking.”
Over the years, Come & Eat has become increasingly professional. In the first year, Syrians who were in emergency shelter at the Jaarbeurs were linked to guest recipients who reported to the square in front of the event complex after a media call. The foundation now has a volunteer who visits reception locations with all ‘offers’. When matching table companions, pets, eating habits (vegetarian/halal) and the wheelchair-friendliness of a home are taken into account.
Moving
In principle, the table companions are matched for one time, but sometimes they continue to visit each other. Kastein: “We experience a lot of moving things. Such as the residents of a restaurant who made their house available to the refugee family they befriended during their holiday. Or the man who wanted to cook a dish for his host recipients, and received instructions over the telephone from his wife who was still in the home country. Guests not only come to get something, but also to bring something, I always say.”
Najwa Alshaar cuts cucumber in the kitchen of Jeroen van der Woude.
Photo Mona van den Berg
After dessert – profiteroles dipped in warm chocolate sauce – a lively debate about Dutch politics ensues in Van der Woude’s small living room. Alsulaiman wants to know whether there were such violent demonstrations in front of asylum seeker centers ten years ago. Ibraheem says that the so-called refugee problem is mainly a management problem. And Alshaar emotionally wonders why Syria is declared ‘safe’ in The Hague, while Christians and Druze are not sure of their lives there.
People who talk about a refugee problem always use the same nonsensical arguments, says Van der Woude. “They would take our houses and rape our girls.” He is pleasantly surprised by the openness of his guests. “There is no solution against intolerance, but hopefully evenings like this will help a little.”
