Column | The Netherlands is more dangerous
Monday I visited a friend who lives in the Javanese countryside. He proudly showed me his herd. “This is our baby,” he said endearingly as he equates me to a bull calf the size of a Harley-Davidson. “He is so fast that we call him Max Verstappen.”
Playt pushed Max’s head against my side, and I tickled his horns. That made him so happy that he jumped into my arms to jump. I fell backwards and strained my entire lower back. The friend took me back to his house and immediately called the local miracle doctor.
“Max Verstappen”, my host whispered to him, at which art sighed. He developed me on my stomach and started sticking acupuncture needles in me. He then told me to relax and even went for a walk.
There I lay on the ground, far away from hearth and home. My back hurt so much I didn’t dare move, but oddly enough I wasn’t worried. On the one hand because the doctor was so sure of his leek, but also because nothing had ever happened to me abroad. It was precisely in my own country that I suffered food poisoning, injuries, broken bones and illnesses. The climbing frame of prot. c. The Rainbow primary school in Borne has so far been a bigger dimension to my health than Norwegian glacier areas, camel rennet cake in Mongolia and fried piranhas in the Amazon. I rode horse across the Russian steppe and camel in the desert of Oman and reached every waterhole unscathed. In Enschede I was only partially able to get on a tricycle and I had already lost half my milk teeth. In Groningen I contracted swine flu, in Utrecht corona. There was proven evidence that for me personally the Netherlands was the most dangerous place on earth, from which I concluded that everything would be fine here in Indonesia.
Was there much wrong with this reasoning? Doubtless! But it’s the little things that keep your mind intact while your body feels like it’s just been run over by a forklift and you’re on the other side of the world. Outside Max Verstappen demolished one palm tree after another and inside the doctor stuck even more needles in me.
“How lucky I am,” I told myself when he even touched my forehead. “In the Netherlands I had really been the sjaak!”
A trickle of fluid that wasn’t blood rolled down my left eyelid and onto my cheek. Touched my skin tenderly, like a butterfly’s kiss from a mother’s mouth.
Ellen Deckwitz writes an exchange column with Marcel van Roosmalen here.
A version of this article also appeared in the December 8, 2022 newspaper