Paul Wildackers contemplating on the background of one of his students.

I remember the intake I had with Remco and his mother. A shabbily dressed woman, who avoided eyecontact and sketched an image of the long road she had travelled with her son from one aiding institution to another, summing up a long list of defects that had seemed to haunt the boy ever since his early childhood. As if this was not enough mysery, they matched the profile of a one-parent home. Apart from all the adolescent unrest they might also be tormented by hidden poverty, with its meagre alimony only to be supplemented by one or two cleaning houses and the odd foldering job. What she neglected to tell me back then was that the father was indeed still part of the family and that there was an elder son who had easily managed to pass for a higher degree of education and was now comfortably looking forward to a lease-car-job (a term I had from Renate Snijders’). Sophie’s Choice. The cruelty of parents. There is always one they love the best. Remco’s mum also failed to mention that Remco got smacked around at home, was yelled at like an untrained dog and kicked out of the house with great regularity to stand shivering in the cold together with other outcasts, only finding favour in smoking a joint.
Even before this term would end the police would make a house call after a first suicide attempt by Remco.

Paul having his own thoughts about the asylum seekers that crowd his school.

As if they were trudging along behind the coffin of their favourite uncle in Mozambique, drying their tears, so slowly did they walk down the corridor of our school. Looking at these people you would not guess that the winner at the one hundred metres at the Olympics, was always a coloured athlete. In their own African pace they moved through this cold world, far from home. A world they could not really convince they wanted to be part of. And who could blame them. Allow yourself to be kicked out of your country, attempting to take on the status of an asylum seeker. Something or other had compelled them to flee from their country. Often a heavily traumatised event was the basis of their flight. A trauma only a paid social worker would lend an ear to as a form of aid. Undoubtedly glory-seekers would sneek through in this anonymous flow of damned people, only to enrich themselves in the glorious Western World. And it is exactly their increasing number that was to influence the consensus that we were not to benefit from the arrival of all these asylum seekers. Humanitary mission unaccomplished. We were picking the same sour grapes as they did in the US in the days of slavery, namely a multicultural society we would be stuck with till Armageddon, with only the smallest chances of real integration. ‘Village Ghetto Land’ was a song the blind Stevie Wonder used to sing back in the days when I was young. That man had more vision than many a politician of today.
But despite all considerations of a broader aspect there was also such a thing as the human side. If you personally knew lads like Mohamed Jalloh and Abdoulai Momisah, all the political talk in the world about asylum seekers did not mean a thing. They were kind, soft-spoken people who displayed a touching willingness to integrate into a society they had not picked in the first place to be part of.