American expat Eric Asp is not sure if he is impressed or revolted by the sheer intricacies of Dutch bureaucracy he finds himself inadvertently bound up in after simply asking for permission to have his six-year-old son miss the last seven weeks of kindergarten.

I had a meeting at ten this morning with a city official to process our family's request for our son to miss the last seven weeks of kindergarten, in order to accommodate for an employer-required three-month "home service leave" (a.k.a. furlough) that cannot but result in some school being missed, since the Dutch summer vacation is only six weeks long. The job title of the man with whom I met was leerplichtambtenaar, which -- I am not making this up -- can be very literally translated as "compulsory education bureaucrat."

Truthfully, I was expecting a fifteen-minute ‘rubber stamp’ type meeting -- more or less automatically approving our request (since the teachers and administrators at Elliot's school haven't expressed any concern about our plans, and since -- seriously -- we're talking about a six-year-old missing a seven-week stretch of kindergarten!).

The Compulsory Education Bureaucrat had really done his homework before heading into our meeting. He had apparently already spoken, with the administration at Elliot's school (and I can't remember for sure, but I think he even said that he had talked with Elliot's kindergarten teacher herself) and gotten a full report of Elliot's educational development and even our family's general involvement in the school.

He had researched the website for Great Commission Ministries (my employer) and printed out mission statements and descriptions of the organisation's world-wide activity. And as he fetched cappuchinos for us to enjoy while we talked, I realised that our meeting was to be no fifteen-minute rubber stamping. In fact, it was an hour-and-a-half of discussion. The tone of the discussion was very pleasant, even neighbourly, but the questions were deep, sincere, and probing:

What exactly is your function within the organisation?

Tell me more about your "home groups." What is the purpose of "home groups" and your function in them?

How did you become a Christian?

So would you say that you feel "called" to work in the Netherlands?

Why does GCM require a three-month "home service leave?" Don't they realise that it conflicts with Dutch educational law?

What exactly will you be doing while you're on your "home service leave?"

How is it exactly that your work in the Netherlands is financially supported?

Is it really necessary that your wife and children come along with you for your home service leave? Couldn't they just join you for the six weeks of the Dutch summer vacation in July and August?

I got the sense that the Compulsory Education Bureaucrat was genuinely trying to understand and not simply antagonise me. At certain moments, I even felt a sense of personal interest in who I am and what I do (he confessed that he was brought up in a Christian home). I could completely understand that the leerplichtambtenaar had been commissioned by the government to do a certain job, to enforce a certain set of laws, and to conscientiously evaluate each case that came across his desk.

Yet I was simultaneously astonished by the amount of time, energy, and money that the Dutch government puts into the investigation of a single family's request for seven weeks of absence from school. I was frustrated that the Dutch philosophy of education stresses the importance of paid professionals so much more than the importance of parents. And I was shocked to leave the office of the ‘compulsory education bureaucrat’ with a considerable stack of homework to be completed before the application for an extended leave of absence will be further processed.

I have to arrange for professional translation of GCM employment policies (as they relate to home service leave). I have to fill out a detailed schedule of my travel plans for the summer (preferably with visual aids, i.e. maps, to help contextualise and inform of the necessity of an extended period of leave). I have to write out a detailed education plan for Elliot, explaining how we will continue to prioritise our son's education while missing school in the Netherlands. I have to provide extra employment documents (my work contract, the mission statement of GCM, a letter from GCM headquarters explaining the intent of a home service leave and the necessity of including the entire family for the entire duration of the home service leave) -- all professionally translated into Dutch by an government-sanctioned translation business. It's crazy!

But I'm working on it. I thought it was interesting today, to map out our travel plans for this summer and compare the scope of American geography to that of the Netherlands (I've displayed the results of this work here on the right, for your amusement). I don't even bother to mark out the differences between Peoria and Chicago, Minneapolis and Alexandria, because the scope of American geography is so much greater than that of the Netherlands (even though the journey between cities like these, even within the same state, would be equal to the distance between two cities in the Netherlands that would be considered "very far apart").

You gotta love the culture clashes, don't you?

26 February 2008

Eric Asp is an American videographer/writer/pastor living in Amsterdam, together with his wife and three children.  His casual and critical observations on life, love, and faith can be found on-line at www.ericasp.com.

[Copyright Eric Asp 2008]