Integrate? After years of living in the US, I still have trouble subduing my inner Dutch girl. Here’s why.
Miss Footloose
Miss Footloose
I hail from the Netherlands and grew up eating lots of Gouda cheese, riding a bike to school, and not wearing wooden shoes. Having adventurous Dutch genes, I married an American Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, East Africa, in an odd if humorous 10-minute ceremony that fortunately has stuck so far. My man is a development economist and I follow him around the world and watch him toil running projects that assist business and agricultural enterprises in developing countries. I have cooked, shopped, mothered, traveled and written stories in Africa, Asia, Europe, the US and the Middle East. I'm an expat writer not living in paradise (like Peter Mayle or Frances Mayes). I do not drink wine from my own grapes or tend my own olive groves. I have, however, visited my butcher's bedroom in Palestine, eaten fertility sausage in Kenya, and almost landed in prison in Uganda.
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Getting searched and groped at airport security is my lot in life. Sometimes it’s more fun than others.
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Going on art gallery crawls in Accra, Ghana, you can find many treasures, like the Yellow Splasher and the Pinhead Painter.
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Should we worry? We found the doctor in the labyrinthine alleys of a tiny Asian village. He wore a Micky Mouse T-shirt and was half-asleep.
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Here I was, in the throes of labor and in comes the doctor, wearing . . . no, not scrubs, not a white coat, but . . . .