Exploring the Netherland’s Humanitarian Landscape (with a few Vermeers and Van Goghs and Rembrandts thrown in for our pleasure and yours)

The Dutch women of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are amazing. They organized a women’s conference, held in Utrecht (in the middle of the small country). They had speakers and musicians and yoga classes and spiritual meditation. They also had a lot of humanitarian projects going on. In the end, humanitarian projects are often much more difficult to arrange and organize than to do. Wonderful women like Shayna and Rachelle and Sheila, all from different stakes, rose to the challenge. They researched charities in the Netherlands that could use their help, and then they organized the 500 women who attended, so anyone who wanted to help with humanitarian projects could. We came along too. 

We assembled hygiene kits for a women’s shelter for asylum seekers who have been turned down by the government but want to keep on trying to become refugees. We assembled art kits for children at shelters. We assembled more hygiene kits for poorer women in the Netherlands.

We sorted baby clothes for a charity that gives 2 years worth of baby clothes to poorer women in the Netherlands before their babies are born. Then, the Church also donated sheets, blankets, baby sleeping bags, and hot water bottles (every Dutch home has hot water bottles for the babies) to the charity.  We ordered and donated 950 kits.  That’s a substantial financial donation.

Then these three women in charge of the humanitarian projects arranged for us and the Lambs, a missionary couple from the Area Office in Frankfurt who are our humanitarian supervisors, to go around the Netherlands to the offices of these charities to discuss what projects we could partner on in the future.

What a great week we had.  We will discuss our research with a council arranged by the Area Offices of the Church in Frankfurt, to decide what to emphasize in humanitarian work and what projects to pursue.

The future of humanitarian work for the Church in Western Europe is bright. One woman at Stichting Babyspollen told us she researched us, and she was surprised to find out how well funded our Church’s humanitarian work is.  As a Church, we spent 1 billion dollars last year on humanitarian work. All of this work is carefully supervised and watched over so money is spent in wise and careful ways.

While we were in Holland, we stayed in Utrecht and attended the Utrecht Branch. Here is the Relief Society.

We went to the Kroller-Muller Museum, which has the 2nd largest collection of Van Goghs in the world.

We find Van Gogh to be an extremely moving painter, and we love to see his works in person where we can see the thick paint and 3-D quality of his painting. His passion shows through everything.

We also went to the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague after meeting with the Red Cross. We have seen many of the 36 existing Vermeers, but we have never seen The Girl with the Pearl Earing in person before. Wow. It is lovely.

Lots of

Rembrandts too.

We stayed in Delft for two nights and enjoyed exploring this amazing small historic city where Vermeer lived. We saw the Royal Delft museum and ate amazing Indonesian food. We walked around this charming city at night under a full moon.

Holland is flat. There are many more wind turbines than windmills now, although they exist side by side.

There are canals everywhere, since the country is so low–much of it is below sea level. The people are environmentally aware, digitally savvy, healthy, and very tall!! Everyone knows English. There are bikes everywhere. Bikes rule, pedestrians don’t. Watch out for bikes wherever you go. There are more bicycles than cars in many cities like Amsterdam.

We fell in love with the Netherlands.