I was recently caught off guard by an email my wife and I received from the school our daughter attends. The message was sent to everyone, and it addresses parents whose children come to school hungry, and appeals that they should have breakfast because they won't have a snack until around noon. I remembered myself and my sisters, whom my mother tried to feed for 12 years of primary and secondary school before leaving, and in most cases we would just look at breakfast and leave. My sisters would even have a snack in their bag, and I was a little more disciplined, I guess because the war overtook me.
That e-mail was followed by another, even more worrying. The school management asks parents to always pack a sandwich, fruit and water for their children. Around ten o'clock you eat fruit, and around noon a sandwich. At the end of the e-mail, there is a note that the school will provide everyone with a sandwich and a fruit tree from that day on, since it has been happening for a long time that some children come without it.
As a relatively new parent, my heart broke, and it never occurred to me that there are children in our school whose parents don't have an apple, a piece of bread and salami. It's especially strange to me because every morning when I come to school, Teslas, Porsches and other expensive cars are parked on the grass and in forbidden places. (The better the car, the more likely the parent will park on the green space.)
I never got the impression that poorer children also go to our school, and as much as the knowledge from the e-mail was heartbreaking, it is also noble at the same time. The school made sure that these differences were not felt too much, although it is very difficult in today's world, especially for older children at a time when status symbols are being used.
Everything seems more organized
When you come to a Western European country, especially the center of a well-known city, the first thing you see is that everything is somehow more organized than in the Balkans. The streets are better maintained, cars are neatly parked, tree rows are nicely trimmed, and people seem less nervous than here. Here and there the city center is being renovated, so you see the scaffolding on a huge church, and the buildings around you exude beauty. There are no collapsing facades, no wild drivers speeding through the center - and everything somehow seems like an idyll.
And if you go a little outside the center, the picture is often different, especially in big cities. Fast cars are all around you, people are a lot more nervous, and the buildings aren't that pretty anymore either. Moreover, then you realize that the social neighborhoods are built much worse than in Yugoslavia, and that in those apartments what hangs, falls. Such a part of the city is usually called a ghetto, but it is not always the case, at least in the Netherlands, that people on the edge of the law live in the ghetto. These people are simply poorer than others and do not necessarily belong to criminal milieu, but simply to a worse-off milieu. They do not fit into the story of "Tesla" as the best-selling car in the Netherlands, nor do they have their own houses or apartments. They usually rent an apartment that their parents got from the municipality under favorable conditions, and as time goes by, it only happens that they sometimes move to another place and that is because of the renovation or remodeling of the neighborhood in which they happen to be. In those cases, the municipality finds them something similar for the same price, and they don't go on the waiting list that other citizens of weaker financial status go to.
These people are engaged in lower paid jobs, and if it happens that one of them is left without income, they very quickly fall into a spiral from which it is difficult to get out. When the social welfare system dries up, the debts start, and then it happens that the Credit Registration Office (BKR) forbids them from any credit activity for several years. Only then is it impossible for them to move forward because real estate prices usually skyrocket, and they often pay tens of thousands of euros in rent - wasted money, while living in a social building built in the '60s where you feel that the walls are made of cardboard.
Twice as many poor than before the pandemic
According to the Agency for Social and Cultural Planning, almost 830.000 people in the Netherlands live in poverty. 200.000 of them are children. People who live below a certain income limit for four years or longer are considered poor. Some sources say that several hundred thousand more are on the verge of poverty, that is, that they are only one or two salaries away from it. Compared to 2021, that number has increased by at least two times.
The pandemic has taken its toll, and all the data shows that the rich are even richer, so it is not surprising that at the same time the best-selling car is the one that costs 50.000 euros and more. During the pandemic, real estate prices also increased, so the average unit cost around 2019 euros in 300.000, and around 2021 euros in 450.000, which is a jump of 50 percent. With the increase in interest rates, prices became lower, and in 2023 they are again below 400.000 euros, which is again unattainable for someone who has two salaries of 2.000 euros each net, even if they are not on the blacklist of the Credit Registration Office.
Parallel worlds live here, people who have excess real estate and cars, and people who have none of these. The latter sometimes drive an old car and sometimes a bicycle. The difference between those who just come to the Netherlands and start from scratch, and those who are blacklisted, is that it is much better to be anonymous with a credit rating of positive zero, because it will mean that you can still start buying real estate, and not losing money on rent. That somehow seems like the basis for a healthy financial situation.
Don't ask why someone didn't buy an apartment
In the meantime, I've learned that if I meet someone who lives in a rented apartment, I don't ask why, because no matter how tempting and high someone's income may seem, it's impossible to know that person's debt history. When it is avoided with answers about "they don't want to buy an apartment", you can usually tell what the problem is.
It is difficult to get out of that spiral, very often and never, and it is similar in other organized countries, so in Germany more than half of pensioners face retirement without real estate, and in the USA almost 38 million people live in poverty. The American CNBC writes that the real situation is probably even worse than that, because the authorities publish the same criteria for the entire country, with no difference in taxes or, say, kindergarten costs. It also shows how GDP may not be a realistic criterion, given that the US has one of the highest per capita rates, and there are many more poor people than in some countries where the median wage is lower.
The Netherlands is also one of the countries where the average salary in the last two years has increased by 600 euros net, while the median value has only increased by 100 euros, which means that the rich have become even richer, while poverty has doubled in the meantime.
Despite all these data, no serious street riots are recorded, so that sometimes it occurs to a person that life is good everywhere.
The reason why the protests continue in France is of a different nature, but they must be honored, because they do not silently observe what is happening around them, but with an attitude they go against every decision that is incomprehensible to an ordinary person. This is the only way in a democracy to fight against the Superhik effect, because as things stand now, there are great chances that the rich will continue to get richer and the poor will continue to get poorer. It is up to all of us to try to prevent this, otherwise there will be more and more children who will not have a piece of bread and salami.
The author is an independent journalist from Sarajevo; For the last ten years, he has been living between Sarajevo and Amsterdam
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