South Africa: Admin... Netherlands: Admin

The most difficult part about moving to a new country is the admin. OK, the admin and getting rid of your house, car, and furniture... only having to replace it all again in a few weeks, in a country where everything is ten times more expensive. And where you have to purchase it in a foreign language where words like "lattenbodem" and "ledikant" suddenly need to form part of your vocabulary. Where you no longer have a bakkie to transport it with. And where it rains constantly, therefore even if you do find a bakkie (which you won't), it will be impossible to use it, because all your belongings will become soaking wet. Did I mention that you also now have to drive on the right side of the road when transporting your items, which is the wrong side, when you come from South Africa? And that everything has to be hoisted x storeys high, because you now live in an apartment and no longer in a house on the “begane grond” level.

But, before you can dive into any of the above-mentioned fun, there is is the admin. Because, in the Netherlands, before you can have or do anything, you first need to open a bank account. And before you can open a bank account, you need a BSN number. And before you can get that, you need a verblijfsvergunning, which takes several weeks and consists of several sub-processes and sub-sets of sub-processes and approvals of pre-approvals.

In January 2020 our admin process(es) started. Together with The Major House Clean-Up. Luckily, my husband dove straight into The Major House Clean-Up, which involved selling our house, selling our furniture, packing the remaining belongings, shipping the belongings, cleaning out the rest of our house and garage, donating what we could, and selling our cars. Not to mention transferring or stopping all our monthly subscriptions and payments. Yes, it was a full-time job of epic proportions.

Concurrently, I was handling the admin linked to my working visa and our residence permits. I won't bore you with the details, but I had a checklist of 113 tasks to complete in South Africa (anything from "find a house" to "legalise original birth certificate in maiden surname by obtaining apostille stamp from DIRCO" and anything in-between). Depressingly I have another 67 tasks to still complete here in the Netherlands.

My husband's last day of work was 2 weeks before I was planning to depart for the Netherlands. I finished 1 week before my departure, and I can honestly say that we worked harder in those last weeks while "on holiday" than we did in any of the weeks before. It happened often that we would start with a sentence and then trail off, forgetting what we were saying, because our minds were so preoccupied with the remaining 74 things to do. Throughout the process we also had to take little leaps of faith and calculated (i.e. nail-bitingly stressful) risks: putting our house on the market, resigning from our current jobs, signing a long-term apartment lease in the Netherlands, etc. I departed for the Netherlands and started at my new job in a new country while my husband and toddler's visas were still being processed back in South Africa.

And, after being in the Netherlands for a week, I have a verblijfsvergunning, but still no BSN and still no bank account.. and therefore still very little of anything else. Why? Because, when I made the appointment at the Gemeente (municipality, not church) and explained in Dutch (yes, Dutch!) that "Ik wil graag een afspraak maken om bij de Gemeente in te schrijven”, the gentleman on the phone assured me (in Dutch!) that "het is prima" and that he was making an appointment for me as we speak.
However, when I showed up at the Gemeente for my appointment, they had no record of me ever phoning! So either my Dutch was so horrifically incomprehensible and my understanding of our 7-minute Dutch phone conversation so horribly misguided, that no appointment had ever been made. Or the friendly Dutch gentleman simply forgot to save my appointment in their system.

Have I mentioned that once you finally manage to secure an appointment for any given step in the process, and have all your (apostilled) documents in order, you often have to wait another 1-3 weeks for the information to be mailed to you, so that you can proceed to the next step?
Yes, actual mail - the kind on paper which gets delivered to a postbox by a mailman outside your home.

This is how it goes in a new country. You might have all the documents, enthusiasm and optimism you need, but because you have to follow the subscribed processes, it is very likely that you won’t be able to do anything until a certain point in the very distant future. Which can be concerning if you have to do something important. Like eat. I have discovered that several grocery stores only accept a Dutch or European debit card... And in order to apply for one, I need a bank account. And to get a bank account...

In the meantime, I can simply write about all the admin I still need to do. Because I’m still waiting for my very first letter to kick-off all the rest of the processes and sub-processes (which might take 1 or perhaps 3 weeks). And only then can I apply for a bank account and only then can I arrange a wifi connection, which is needed to publish this blog post.

So... if you get to read this within the first month of my arrival in the Netherlands, it’s an absolute miracle at this stage!