Something about me 

My father took this picture of me seated in my parents' living room, when I came to show off my new digital camera, July 2003.  

I was born in Amsterdam, 1949, first living in the centre, then in the suburbs, and now back in the centre again. After my secondary school I studied Dutch for a couple of years at university, until I found I did not have the personality to teach class. I switched the subject of my studies and became after quite some years a psychologist. I found a job at an institution that provided care for addicted people, and have been working in this field ever since. My Dutch studies left their mark in keeping me interested in languages, I speak several and now have been struggling with the most difficult to me, Turkish, for some years. 

Because of a merger of my former employer, the Amsterdam Foundation for Drug assistance,  (SDA) I came to work for the Jellinek. My specialty there was to manage forms of housing for clients who needed a form of temporary or long term housing. Temporary housing was provided in a night shelter for up to 28 people or in one of three flats for people "passing through". More long term housing could be provided to clients willing to participate in one of several forms of "Managed Occupancy", best seen as a kind of school for those aspiring to have their own apartment. Clients who fared well in this school would have the contract to the apartment written to their name after half a year or more. In all these forms of housing facilities the social need was put first in the sense that drug (or alcohol) usage was no objection, provided the client would keep within generally accepted bounds.

In the late 1990's I moved to a different job within Jellinek as a member of its staff. I have been working for a project, part of a nation wide move aimed at providing all personnel in the mental health sector with their own job description and valuation (this is named FWG3.0, whoever is interested, seek under  links). Because the project was terminated I had to stop my activities for EATI, the European Addiction Training Institute, an institute that did what the name said: develop and implement training courses in Europe, aimed at all forms of addiction. I assisted in some of their training activities and specifically was employed for what was called Transdrugs, a project to gauge training needs for workers in the addiction field, it was financed by Leonardo da Vinci, a European organization. As a proud result my name in Google will  provide you with a number of articles I wrote for that project. 

In 2004 I started work for the Quality and Innovation department at Jellineks, where I partook in activities concerning quality management, intra- and internet, and whatever came my way. To complicate matters, Jellinek merged with a more general mental hearth oriented organisation, Mentrum, now calls itself JellinekMentrum, and is bound to merge with another partner. Still, quality is my field nowadays (I write this update April 2008). 

Throughout my working life I have mainly dealt with severely addicted people, often addicted to several drugs, and aiming less at "kicking the habit" (in order to reach so called abstinence) as at creating a humane existence for clients who did not find it within their own powers to make such an existence come true. I think that many problems relating to addiction are produced by a societal reaction to the use of substances, and might be prevented by a more lenient attitude towards their use and abuse. Gradually this insight is gaining ground nationally and internationally, but before we came this far many people (amongst them friends and acquaintances) have been criminalized and financially run to ground through law making and the likes of that. 

I have in my younger years put quite some energy in the then emerging gay movement, in particular in the Amsterdam Action groups for Homosexuality, and later worked a couple of years at the national headquarters of COC, the major society for the integration of gays into society. There too it was obvious how a societal reaction might cause much damage to citizens who did nothing wrong in their own eyes, but got into trouble anyhow, due to a social verdict. 

Both in regards to addiction and in regards to homosexuality I hope that the tolerance will keep increasing, both in the Netherlands an (far) beyond them. It remains to be seen if the pendulum of history will not swing back some day. 

I like visiting museums, for old rather then the newest art. As for travel, I have been regularly visiting Turkey throughout the last 10 years, where I have by now visited most of the important cities and regions, with a preference for the Eastern provinces and the Black Coast. I have been a regular in Italy for years too, but so many pictures have been taken there that I prefer to stick to Turkey on these pages.