I open the door and a warm blast of air hits me. I linger in the doorway, enjoying the welcome relief from the bitter cold outside. A moment later I am enjoying a warm welcome. “Goedemorgen!” My favourite waiter is attentive and provides just the recognition I need. Here I am in a foreign city, an unaccustomed way of life, full of strange traditions and someone knows me! I saunter into the bar, playing the expat game. I sit down in a familiar place, survey the walls to see if the previous paintings have been sold and find that they are gone. I can sip my coffee and enjoy a whole new set of tempting experiments in texture and colour. I never buy them but just love to imagine them on my wall and wonder how they would suit my décor and wonder what my husband would say if he returned home to find one of them on the wall.

I peel off the layers of clothing and cuddle up to the radiator. Outside, the canal looks cold and oily: it is just on the point of freezing over. A couple of moorhens swim past and disappear under the bridge. Across the canal the shops are beginning to open up. It’s Monday lunchtime. A waitress approaches. “Hello! Hoe gaat het? Wilt u wat drinken?” she says cheerily and I order my usual koffie verkeerd. Maybe later I’ll think about a spot of lunch.

I settle down to write: ‘A sense of belonging’. I have been pondering this theme for a while and now it’s time to put some of these thoughts down on paper. Where better to do it than in my favourite café – my ‘club’! I have lived for some years now this strange expat lifestyle. After a while the rules of the game become clear. The first rule of expatriate life, it seems, is joining. At home I’ve never really been a joiner but here it is essential. Away from your home country, separated from family and without an extensive network (at least, at first) of friends and colleagues, the thing to do is to join things. Staying at home, plagued by uncertainty and nervousness, grieving for things from the home country, is no way to go on. Tempting though it can be to mope, getting out and about is the answer.

My first excursion into joining was a trip to ACCESS. I planned my strategy carefully and whilst engaged in early house-hunting trips, I thought long and hard about what I was going to do when we arrived. My husband was going to be busy with his job. My daughter was married and living in another country – how could we complain? We taught her the expat lifestyle ourselves! So finding myself a niche was going to be essential. The Hague-based organisation which gave help and information to internationals in the Netherlands seemed a good place to start. Before we even arrived in the Netherlands I had made arrangements to work there as a volunteer, just to make sure I would have somewhere to run to immediately having set foot in Holland.

Arriving at the old ACCESS office, situated in those days in the Plein in the centre of The Hague, one was confronted by a poster. “Feeling far from home?” it demanded. To be honest it almost reduced me to tears on one or two occasions, when I was feeling particularly sensitive and homesick! However, ACCESS boasted an answer: “ACCESS – a home away from home!” and it was true. After an introductory workshop I quickly joined up. It worked. Surrounded by friendly English-speaking people I felt at home. After a few training sessions, and still feeling like a novice, I gingerly picked up the helpdesk phone: “Good morning, ACCESS, how can I help you?” Gradually, with the help of my colleagues and after hours spent perusing the huge database of local information, I gained confidence and looked forward to my weekly shifts of problem-solving. Information on schools, health insurance, residence permits, employment agencies, rubbish collection and house rentals were my stock in trade, but I soon learned to love the weird collection of more unusual requests for details of where to buy organic vegetables, where to get the dog clipped, and where to pick blackberries locally(!).

There followed a small string of volunteering projects, all of them providing valuable experience, free coffee, annual Christmas ‘volunteer reward’ lunches or volunteer ‘potluck’ lunches and, best of all, ready-made friends. In the course of my volunteering I have answered the telephone, sent hundreds of informative emails, emptied the dishwasher (countless times), researched blogs written by expats for the Expatriate Archive, proofread magazine articles, written newsletters, issued school library books, made coffee, edited non-native English speakers’ impossible English – although, if I am truthful, I am full of admiration that they manage to write anything at all in somebody else’s language!

All in all, I have become an expert joiner! Volunteer organisations, social networks, sports clubs, dining out clubs are all good: anything which means a group of people to which I can belong! On top of that, there are my favourite bars and cafes where I can sit all day, be greeted warmly by the staff who all ‘know me’ and write (very knowledgeably) about that elusive sought-after quality of ‘a sense of belonging’.
 

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