The Story of my parents (Part 1) (7/29/2025)

My father was born in 1922 in Rotterdam; he was the youngest of three brothers. I would need to do some research one of these days to figure out if being the youngest had anything to do with how he turned out. It always seemed to me he was always running away from something; maybe not so by the end of his life; but that is even debatable. He committed suicide in 1984, which is a method of getting away from it all; but that is getting ahead of the story.

My grandfather owned a contracting business. I previously wrote about my family’s background in the construction trade in my blog, and the following is a quote from the post:

Uncle Willem (Wim), dad's brother owned a construction company, and when we moved back to the town of Capelle and den IJssel in 1996 he had developed and built almost ¾ of that town. As I mentioned before my opa (grandfather) owned a construction company, as well. However, my uncle Wim built his company on his own, from scratch. My great-grandfather (my grandfather’s father) was also into construction. He was a very skilled carpenter and his claim to fame was that he supposedly built the Bijenkorf (a large department store) in the center of The Hague (Den Haag). This must have been in the early 1900s.

The one thing he told me about his growing up was the meetings that were held at his home. I think they had maybe clandestine meetings of the Dutch communist party. I am not sure if these meetings were held before or after the second World War. He told me about his memory of the singing of the “International”, the communist anthem. He also mentioned often intently listening to Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concerto de Aranjuez; during or after discussions on the Spanish civil war of the 1930s; the same one Hemingway was in. This concert was published in 1939 and first recorded in 1947. My father played it a lot when I was young, telling me that it brought him back to those (post WWII) meetings; to the time, I guess, when he was 25 and about to marry my mother in 1948. The second movement of the piece may actually be a memorial to the bombing of Guernica in 1937.

My father had one best friend, Piet Doornbos and his parents lived in an upstairs apartment in the house owned by my grandfather. Piet’s father worked for my grandfather and stories abound that my grandfather would frequent the upstairs apartment, especially when Piet’s father was at work. My grandfather had a reputation of sleeping around; and my mother, Piet’s wife and my grandmother (oma) were always privately wondering if my father and Piet were half-brothers, since they were so alike in behavior. But on the other hand, they grew up together, so who knows? They confided their suspicion to me, but I do not think they ever told the two men. I am not even sure if Piet’s kids were ever told of the women’s suspicion.

My grandparents owned a vacation cabin and a daysailer on the Rottemeren, a lake on the river de Rotte, north-northeast of Rotterdam. I have photographs of the family outings to the lake, and my father and brothers (including Piet) as boy scouts sailing on the lake.

Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940. My father was barely 18 years old. His brothers were in the Dutch military, and my understanding is that they took part in the Battle of the Grebbeberg. The Germans won that battle and slowly advanced. On May 14 they bombed Rotterdam and demanded unconditional surrender. Right after the bombing, probably on the 14th or 15th the city emptied; people fled the burning city. My father and his parents traveled up the Rotte to their cabin. It is my understanding that during that evacuation or maybe during previous outings, my mother who lived in Terbregge along the river noticed my father and vice versa and a love story developed. My mother was almost 13 years old at the time of the bombing, and she told me that her friends and her were fascinated by these older boisterous boys on the river.

My mother told me that she did not have a happy youth. Her mother was mean; and when I grew up, we all thought grandma looked like a witch. I realize that is not a nice way to think about your grandmother, but later I learned she had acted a little like that as well. When my mother grew up, she would tell her: “I don’t understand why I have three beautiful sons and you an ugly daughter. I am not sure where you came from; maybe the milkman left you here with one of his deliveries.” She also treated her husband like dirt, and he walked (was kicked) out of his home three times for six-month stints, and then he crawled back home. He (Simon van den Ende) was the proprietor of the local butcher shop and when he left home he moved into a boarding house near his store. My mother told us that he was somewhat of a pushover, a softy. Hence, my young mother’s interest in this happy family that had fun on the river.

Opa van den Ende died in 1956. I know that I met him (I have a photograph of me sitting on a potty in front of him); I was 3 at the time. I stayed with oma in Terbregge for 3 months in the summer and early fall of 1959. I briefly attended the first grade in the village and contracted mononucleosis; kissing disease at the ripe old age of 6. I remember the walk from school to the gate in oma’s back yard.

My grandparents on their sailboat on the Rottermeren

My parents.  I am not sure what the date is, if they were dating or married.

My eulogy/autobiography (7/4/2025)

I just turned 72 and am sitting here on pins and needles waiting for the word that my first grandson was born. This will be a thing of the past by the time this writing will be made public, either as part of a memoire and/or a blog post. Why now, can we blame turning 72, my grandson, or my daughter or her wife for this introspection? I don’t know; it is probably a combination of a lot of things.

I am in a men’s group, and we assigned ourselves the project of writing our own eulogy. If that wasn’t enough, during a birthday get together a good friend asked me all kinds of biographical questions, and unbeknown to me he taped the whole conversation. He showed me that he was recording it after my birthday dinner at a Mexican restaurant. This made me feel self-conscious, and together with the fact that I now will have someone to carry on the torch (a grandson), it made me want to record a little more of mine and my family’s history. I have done a bit of this already in some of my blog posts, and I may refer to them when appropriate. I expect that I will publish sections of this writing in my blog, again in the hope that those of my direct family that comes after me will read it and find it interesting, useful and informative.

Where to start? But below is a section of the eulogy that I wrote for myself or maybe for those celebrating my life on this blue marble once I kick the proverbial bucket.

“What the heck is Kalemi? Well actually it is a town in the far eastern part of Congo. During colonial times it was the Belgium Congo, and the town was named Albertville after one of Belgium’s monarchs. I (my name) was born in that town on June ??, 195?. We are gathered here to celebrate the premature passing of Jan-Willem or as many of his friends knew him “Jan the man.” As he often told us that when at a doctor’s office no one got up when a name was called, it meant it was his turn to see the doctor. Everybody seemed to have difficulties pronouncing his name, and then when “Jan” got up they seemed even more confused. Is Jan a guy?”

Did it frustrate me that folks had difficulties with my name, my first and last name? Not at all, I found it amusing. In its own way it showcased the lack of cosmopolitan experience that I have observed in this country. Living in Cincinnati in the late 1990s I was always tickled when during our first meeting folks would ask me which high school I had graduated from. Like the majority in the area, they had never spread their wings, and they could obviously not fathom that there was actual life outside Cincinnati. Even more fun was when they told you about the great vacation they had in Indiana, a state maybe less than 20 miles to the west. Here in the Hampton Roads, where I currently live, it is a little less narrow-minded, since there is a large concentration of military and ex-military that have spent time in foreign countries on military installations or at war.

During the clandestinely recorded interview our friend Mason wanted to know how the heck I ended up being born in a small town situated on Lake Tanganyika (or now Lake Tanzania). Well, my father had a job there as director of a furniture company. That raised even more questions, so here we need to pause and start with the story of my father, which then raised the question of how my father and mother met. As you can imagine, the questions never ended.

I'll stop here.  If there is a next post it will be about my father before 1948.

Me as a 10-month-old on Lake Tanganika in the Congo

My dad and I around the same time.

Mother and son

Honor your ancestors (Story of my life 4) (3/7/2025)

I have been watching a documentary on YouTube called Kintsugi (The Ancient Japanese Practice that Will Heal You). While a lot of people that know me closely might say that this is wasted time for me; I am so screwed up and cannot be healed. As part of the healing process, the 4-part series taught me about the importance of honoring the people who came before me: my ancestors. I feel that the least thing I can do is write about them, which is as close as I can get to visiting their past lives and thus honoring them. I don't know where they are buried; moreover, that is a continent, and an ocean removed from where I now live. 

I come from a long line of builders. My father started out as an engineer and road builder. After the Second World War he briefly worked for his father who owned a construction company. He married my mother in August 1948 and sometime after that they departed to Kinshasa in what was then the Belgium Congo, where he had taken a job in the road construction business. Back then it was called Léopoldville. He did not last long and after two years or so took a job as a director of the furniture manufacturing company in Albertville (now known as Kalemi) in the eastern part of the Congo. This is the place where I was born. We moved to Antwerp in Belgium when I was 2 years old. In Antwerp, dad was working on the restorations of the “Grote Kerk,” the main church in downtown Antwerp. We moved to the Caribbean in 1956 and lived 13 years in Curacao and a half year or so in Aruba. Dad started out in the road building industry, became a director of a construction company, and an architect. He continued managing the restoration of some of the old buildings along the harbor of Willemstad, the capital of Curacao. After moving back to the Netherlands, my father worked in the construction management field and traveled all over the world. He spent time in Germany, Turkey, Congo, Cameroon, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Indonesia before he finally retired. 

Uncle Willem (Wim), dad's brother owned a construction company, and when we moved back to the town of Capelle and den IJssel in 1996 he had developed and built almost ¾ of that town. As I mentioned before my opa (grandfather) owned a construction company, as well. However, my uncle Wim built his company on his own, from scratch. My great-grandfather (my grandfather’s father) was also into construction. He was a very skilled carpenter and his claim to fame was that he supposedly built the Bijenkorf (a large department store) in the center of The Hague (Den Haag). This must have been in the early 1900. The odd duck out was Karel, my father’s oldest brother. He ended up owning an optical store. Anyway, from the two brothers down to my great-grandfather they were all very skilled and talented carpenters. Even Herke, Karel's son, was a very accomplished woodworker. 

I do not know much about my mother's side. Her father was not into building. Opa van den Ende was a butcher and owned a butcher shop in Terbregge a small suburb of Rotterdam. Mom (or Ma as we called her) had three brothers, one (Jan) died in a German concentration camp, and another (Cor) was an accountant. I do not know what the third brother (Siem) did. The only thing that is somewhat related to building is my mom's second nephew Ben. Ben was the owner of a kitchen installation and renovation company. 

Naturally, one cannot help comparing all these folks that went ahead of me with my skills and abilities. However, together, my wife and I have renovated three bathrooms, including two in our current home. In Yemen I built my own house and a plant nursery and office; I also built a wooden play structure for our daughter, in Gallup, NM. In our current home my wife and I tiled a huge portion of our home (kitchen, breakfast room and library/stove room), we built two sheds from scratch and a woodshed. I also built a large built-in bookcase in our home. Finally, during the past 15 years I taught environmental compliance to folks in the construction industry. In other words, I dare say that I somewhat continued the family tradition in the building industry (sorry Opa van den Ende). 

It is fun to see where your forefathers come from and how you fit in the continuing story of a family, of your life. And yes, I do believe there are healing properties in writing and paying respect to your forefathers. I am really not writing this as a self-gratification exercise, but also for my daughter, my future grandson, nieces and nephews. I believe that family history is important and honoring them by documenting their existence in this manner will hopefully make them live forever. We have such powerful tools to do this by being able to blog on the internet, unlike our forefathers who did not have these tools and depended on passing stories down orally. The internet can be a very useful tool when it is used in such a way, as opposed to constantly maligning one another, as is seen in the case of the social media where it is often done now, in our polarized world.

This is the only thing I have from my great-grandfather.  It is a fishing basket he made.  It is supposed to be suspended in the water to hold the fish you caught, and shaped in such a way that you can easily carry it laying on your side while hanging from a strap 

On Ken Burns and Hemingway (4/24/2021)

I watched Ken Burns’ special on Ernest Hemingway. I found it interesting. But boy, being a member of Unitarian community; however, it was a different story. Unitarians are notoriously more liberated, forward thinking, more liberal thinking, feminist folks; and a lot of them saw the documentary as an acknowledgement of a man who was a drinker, womanizer, into bull fighting, and racist. In other words, he was an example of anything that was wrong with a man. However, from what I saw he was a reflection of the time he was living in.

I do not want to defend Hemingway. In fact, I have only read one of his books, his “Old Man and the Sea” which I really enjoyed. I need to read more. I found Mr. Burns' documentary eye opening. A man with his struggles. A man who was in a way tormented by his parents, a thing I can understand. Mine were not the easiest ones. Hemingway was someone who was disciplined or maybe tried to be disciplined, in his writing but had to let loose when he did not write, usually in the afternoon, evenings or when he had writer’s block of some kind.

I did not watch it thinking what a misogynistic guy Hemingway must have been, falling in love with all these younger women that he ran in to. Hell, I think I could as well, if I were someone rich, famous, and decent looking, because I think those are some the prerequisites of being attractive as an older male to younger women. But as an older male, I know, there are some young women who just walk past me to whom I feel an instant attraction. I know it is their odor. Not perfume or cologne, but as I explain to myself: the smell of a woman, of fertility, of ovulation, receptiveness. I wonder if that was the thing that handcuffed Hemingway. I just miss the swagger he must have had, the fame.

No, the documentary grabbed my attention because of a number of other things. As I mentioned before, the rise and the fall of a person. How this outwardly manly man had a feminine, maybe even subordinate side in his relationship with his wife. The development of a writer was spellbinding to me; maybe because I still aspire to become one, hence this blog. But here again, I am likely over the hill and missed the boat; no “Old man and a boat or the sea” for me, I guess. However, I was also fascinated by the places Hemingway visited and lived. This was partially because our lives, my younger one and his, overlapped at times and in certain places.

Let’s start at my beginning. Some of you may know that I was born in Eastern Congo. I have written about it a time or two. You all can search the keyword list, there are two mentions (three with this one). In her book “How Dare the Sun Rise” Sandra Uwiringiyimana describes growing up not far from where I was born, but then takes it on a very intense ride as refuge (I briefly mention it here). When I was one and a half years old, my parents and I traveled back to Holland. We did this by taking the ferry across Lake Tanzania, into Tanzania, and the train to Dodoma, and (I think) on to Arusha. From either Dodoma or Arusha, we had to take a taxi to Nairobi to catch an airplane to the Netherlands. My mother always loved to tell me that when we arrived after dark in Nairobi, no hotel was willing to take us in, and no we did not need to sleep in a stable, but we ended up sleeping that night at the YMCA on army cods. The reason was we drove that day, afternoon and evening through an area that was in the hands or infested by the Mau Mau. The Mau Mau were the freedom fighters against the British colonial rule, and at the time they were known to be as one of the most ruthless group of guerillas known to mankind. No one understood how we had come through the area in one piece, especially at night! We (my parents) were basically suspected of being Mau Mau sympathizers. Now from Ken Burns I learned that at the time of our crossing (1954/55) there was a famous American author in the area: Ernest Hemingway! He actually married a local young tribal woman, while was wife was ill and convalescing in Nairobi.

I was born in Kalemie (previously Albertville) in the Congo.  Dodoma the place we took the train to is on the far right on the map.  

After a brief period in Holland and Belgium, we moved to the Caribbean, where I spent my youth. I lived there 13 years. We did some deep-sea fishing, boating, sailing. I even visited Cuba, probably after Hemingway left. It was in 1959, a few months after Castro had taken over. I visited the far eastern coast, and we went up the tallest mountain of Cuba and we visited Havana. Being only 6 years old, I still remember being cold on top of the mountain (9000+ feet) and that Havana looked almost deserted and eerily empty.

But Mr. Burns’ stories about Havana, the sea, Kenya where I returned in the late 1970s, the tropics in general and the stories about Hemingway were fascinating and brought me back to the stories of my youth. Together with stories of Hemingway’s tormented life, I therefore had no problem looking past the not-so nice parts of his character and forgiving him for his flaws or enjoying the series.

George Floyd or Black Lives Matter (6/1/2020)

I am upset. This country is being torn apart, hijacked by certain people, a noble cause is being drug through the mud, allowing dog whistles to fly.

Let me explain, I am white or Caucasian if you have not figured that one out yet. I was born in the darkest of Africa, the Congo. I often joke that this makes me an African American, although I have a distinct advantage of having a white skin color. I can only imagine what real African Americans go through.  I have actually been subject of reverse discrimination of which I write about here.  I grew up in the Caribbean and had white, brown and black friends. We did not see the difference (and this was in the 1960s). In my adult life, I worked in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and on a Native American Reservation. Again, it acknowledged to me that we are all the same. We all put on our pants in the morning, one leg at a time. Currently, in front of our home we have a sign that reads “Black Lives Matter.” 

The sign in our front yard.  We got this at our church and we proudly show this in our front yard.  We get people stopping by, who tell us how much they like it.

I have not been blogging much lately, this Covid-19 business has gotten me down, but as you can probable surmise, the George Floyd murder and what is currently happening to this country is really upsetting me. Yes, I am as upset about it as everyone else. While I am against the death penalty, I almost wish the police officer would face a similar penalty: “death by knee strangulation.” What upset me almost as much was the video of one of the police officers quickly looking at the scene and then looking away.

What also upsets me is what followed. I really liked the nationwide demonstrations. They are needed to focus attention on what is happening to the black community and they are needed to bring social and political change. Boy, do we need social and political change (I might write about it later). However, I do not like the looting and the burning of buildings that accompanied it all.

Our church is on the border of a black, somewhat poor neighborhood, and since the outbreak of Covid-19 I think it was burglarized 3 times. In my mind and I have explained it to my wife by telling her that probably these folks cannot or have a hard time getting unemployment or even the stimulus check. To be able to survive they have to go to food pantries, food kitchens or rely on burglary. Case-in-point, the food was stolen out of the fridge at church, in addition to the laptop. So the looting of grocery stores maybe, but fancy sneaker stores, not really. In addition, it seems that there are right-wing agitators in the crowd that maybe egging them on or are really the Molotov cocktail throwers and fire starters. 

It was Dillan Root the white-supremacist Charleston Church killer, who hoped that his killing would “start the revolution.” Other white-supremacists were hoping their action would do the same thing. I am afraid that this is what the agitators are trying to do, assisted by Trump, who is sending dog whistle after dog whistle to his troops and supporters, and the failing Republican Party. We need to go back to peaceful protest and do the following things:

1. Elect Biden as our next president
2. When we do that, make sure that Biden selects a young, dynamic person as vice-president. Because, we all know that Biden will serve for one term and this person will be next. We need a new generation of leaders and thinkers in this country. I am a 66-year-old baby boomer and I realize it is time for new thinkers. Mayor Pete or a younger white or black male or female would be a good choice.  (I used to be a Klobuchar fan, but it seems that she did not prosecute the cop that killed George Floyd for a previous violation when she was the District Attorney).
3. Trow the republicans out of congress and the senate, they are obstructionists and cling to the old ideas of yesterday that don't work and have caused the situation we are in now (the riots and the Corona pandemic).
4. All these protesters should understand what Trump is doing, keep up the demonstrations (peacefully) and they should use the power of their vote to force social and political change. Get people registered and get people to the poles in November. Yes, Trump and his cronies are going to call them socialists or worse communist. Remember, he is in bed with Putin, the real communist dictator.

Racism 101 (7/15/2019)

I was born in the darkest of Africa. No, not South Africa as many always want to guess since I am white, so South Africa is a good guess. However, I was born in what was called the Belgium Congo, in those days. In my young years, my family moved to the Caribbean. I will not bore you with my life’s story, but never in my early life did I encounter obvious racism in real life. Yes, my parents would make fun how folks on the island would exhibit status, by putting a TV antenna on their roof while obviously not having electricity at a time that battery powered TVs were not yet invented, or having a refrigerator on the front porch and not having electricity. Sadly, these disadvantaged people were mostly black folks, but again, to me that was more making light of the need to exhibit some form status and trying to keep up with the Joneses, than a form implicit racism. We had black families over and I was partially raised by Rosa our black housekeeper. 

This photograph of a mask was taken at an exhibition of Congo masks at the museum in Richmond, this past January.   It supposedly comes from the region I was born in.   Boy I would not feel comfortable going back there if our xenophobic leader would tell me to go back there.  Moreover, read the book: How dare the sun rise, by Sandra Uwiringiyimana which is partially set in that area as well and in the US, and you will also understand what the result can be of tribalism and racism 

The first time that I consciously encountered racism was during my first visit to the U.S. The passenger ship that we had taken from the island (Curacao) where we lived, to travel to Europe (Lisbon) had docked in Miami and we were allowed to take excursions. It was 1959, I was almost six years old and all I remember from that outing was taking a “train” ride through an Indian reservation and watching Indians do their thing. Half-naked Indians sitting in front of teepees, cooking above fires, etc. I have no idea whether these Indians were actually living there, or if they were actors and went home after the park or reservation closed for the night. However, I can clearly remember that it hit me as sad and exploitative. Closing my eyes, I am still on that open choo-choo train looking at those indians some 60 years ago. On the other hand, seeing alligators for the first time was kind of exciting, another thing I remember from that day.

Whether it was racism or tourism or a combination of it all, I will never know; however, the next time I noticed real racism was driving through the inner city of Baltimore with friends who we visited during our second visit to the U.S. four years later (1963). Our friends, who were Dutch, had recently emigrated from the island to the U.S. They were somewhat down and negative about the African American folks who moved into and lived in their neighborhood. They told us that when the blacks moved into a neighborhood, it was downhill from there. They were exploring to move out to the suburbs, away from it all. When we came back two years later in 1965, they had done just that and moved out. 

I think it was during my visits to Baltimore that I learned about the divide between black and white. At that time, in 1965, we had just left the Island of Aruba where we had lived for about 9 months. I remember so well that almost every afternoon after school, I would walk with a black classmate (friend) of mine to the harbor in Oranjestad to go fishing, and we would fish for part of the afternoon. If we would not go fishing, we would play soccer (football) or climb in either the mango trees or the tamarind tree in our backyard and eat the fruit. Fruit that was not ripe we would lay on top of the roof for a few days to ripen. We were completely colorblind although I had no idea what that word meant or that that word even existed. My father had a dark room where we printed photographs and that was where I learned the words black and white.

I think the sad part is that the common thread here is that the place I was exposed to racism was in the U.S., the country in which I now live; the country I have become a citizen of. I am sure that there was racism on the islands, in the Netherlands where we went on vacation, but it must have been hidden or more below the surface. Maybe my parents did not associate themselves with those people. Yes, we had the riots in 1969 in Curacao where half the town burned down, but my understanding was that these were more labor related than race; although some tried to relate them to what happened here in the US after the assassination of Martin Luther King around that time. However, I was young and naive and I am sure race played into it. After hearing what happened in the Congo, my parents were scared and we moved to the Netherlands fairly soon after those riots.

Where am I going with this blog post? I am a member of a religious community (the UU) that is mostly white and which has a “Black Lives Matter” banner hanging in front of the church. At home, we have a yard sign that says the same thing. I have written about this issue before <here>, where I wrote about my experience in New Mexico being stopped at immigration checkpoints in a vehicle with Mexican Americans, who were US citizens. I was the only non-citizen and experienced first hand that racial profiling in this country is real, but then in a ridiculous way. 

We have elections coming up where the leader of one party has been called a racist, actually acts like it or at least panders to them. This week he called out four female representatives of color with non white last names and two with non-christian religions and told them to go back to their country. Three of the four were born in the US and one is a naturalized US citizen. He has called neo-nazis good people.

It amazes me that in the 60 years since my first visit to this country there is still so much hate, fear and distrust to go around between the various races in this country. While it seems we made progress, I also see that in the past years we slid back. Maybe people filled with hatred and fear are coming out of the woodwork and dare to express themselves more? Whatever it is, it is going to take time to reverse this trend, but we are going to have to do it. We have to fight it and the people who refuse to call it out like many of the Republicans in congress and the senate who just shrug their shoulders and ignore what the guy at the top is saying.