Études

1.

There is nothing gentle about the winter here.

2.

There is this thing in the EVS, the Youthpass, and it is talked about like the Resurrection: in mentions, vaguely portentous terms, and no one ever really knows anything.

It is, purportedly, the list of capacities that one manages to acquire during the EVS program.

The keyword is non-formal learning, and the list of competences, starting with obscure concepts like “communication in mother and foreign tongue”, and ends with the similarly fuzzy “cultural awareness and expression”.

I am not even sure why I think about this now, but the whole thing makes me feel indistinctly uncomfortable.

3.

They say that the sad truth about all this is that you may be pretty and smart, but that will not necessarily make you a good person.

I think the only sad truth about all this is that the concept of good has run out of substance in our postmodernist times.

4.

The thing I learnt that will not be on any certificate: to reconcile postmodernist thinking with religiosity, new age spiritualities and activism.

The latters are in fact so similar that it is rather disconcerting.

5.

My friend’s third appeal for status was denied.

I don’t think I should ever learn to cope with this one.

6.

Everyone with some academic background tells me that the place where I live is an ethnographic goldmine. I did start writing up some kind of a furtive clandestine field note, but the thing is that life here is actually quite mundane, so doing anything of sorts is pretty difficult.

But: I started a research project with the refugee centre, and I am very much excited. There will be proposals and methodology and results and conclusions, and I will be going around collecting stories legitimately. I don’t think it will contribute anything to my “character development” by me overcoming a “personal challenge”, but “becoming a good person” doesn’t speak much to me on these terms, so I don’t really mind.

7.

The hearsay is that the picturesque Egmond Binnen where we reside has a brazen nightlife with what you might call a pub culture, so Ildi and I ventured in town at night with all the swag of nameless revolver heroes after having watched some subversive neo-Western haze. We had fun.

8.

I seriously intend to write something informative for future volunteers. You know, we carry on, our present lives, our broken Dutch.

- Thuy