Serve the City

My arms ache but my fingers can still type.  Yesterday Andrew and I spent the day volunteering with a project called Serve the City.  We did it last year and it was a load of fun so we signed up again this year and ended up scraping and painting an elderly couple's bedroom.  Serve the City is a 4 day event that happens in a few of the big cities in Holland.  The days are spent using our hands to show love, creativity, care and to serve.  Yesterday volunteers did things like help out at a flea market at a mental institution, take elderly people on tram and boat rides, hand out flowers in the streets, and lots of other cool things.

Yaderah and John were 2 other volunteers who joined in the fun with us.  My knowledge of world geography is getting so much better here as I meet people from places I didn't even know about.  John is from Suriname a country in South America and Yaderah is from Curacao an island in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela.

The transformation of the room we painted was incredible.  There was a build-up of nicotine on the walls and roof from cigarette smoke.  We washed everything down to get some of the residue off and then the paint went on.  This was the difference on the roof, wow.

The couple were lovely.  I yabbered away to them in English and they yabbered away to me in Dutch and we had a good old laugh.  Olaf was a big old German with a great sense of humour and his little wife Maria had such a spark of mischief in her eyes.  We had been told that she has dementia and would repeat things like offering you a cigarette over and over.  I couldn't understand a word she said so I have no idea how many times I was offered a smoke!

Maria took a shine to Andrew and I and she demanded that she had a photo taken with both of us.  And she called Andrew 'mooi' which means beautiful in Dutch, I think I had a little competition!  It was so lovely though, she came outside the house and waved and blew kisses as we cycled away, one happy customer.

It was a great day and we ended it with a picnic in Vondelpark with lots of other volunteers and a game of volleyball.  And nothing has changed.  I still suck at volleyball.