Dutch expats in the US city of Austin are getting to know each other via a website, Meetup. An increasing number of Dutch nationals living abroad are using specialised internet sites to find each other.

Marc and Tania van Bree hoped to find a vibrant, active Dutch community in Austin when they and their 14-month-old daughter Ellie moved to the Texan capital from Chicago, Illinois at the beginning of this year. Marc comes from Erp, a town in Brabant and Tania is Mexican-American and grew up in Austin. “We’re living really close to my family now and we see each other all the time," says Tania, adding, "but I think it's really important that my daughter also gets to know her Dutch roots and culture.”

Austin Dutch Club
In contrast to Chicago, Austin – with a population of almost 800,000 – proved difficult for the Van Brees to find other Dutch nationals.
Tania: “There isn't even a consulate here and I couldn't find much on the internet, certainly not a Dutch club. I was already a member of the South Austin moms on the Meetup website and I thought, we could do that for Dutch people. And so we set up the Austin Dutch Club on Meetup.”

Keywords such as Dutch, Holland and Sinterklaas (Santa Claus' Dutch counterpart) quickly hooked the attention of other Dutch expats in Austin. Marc: “I really hadn't expected that so many people would respond. We had 15 responses within a month and seven people turned up to the first meeting."

Football World Cup
During the first meeting, held at the beginning of June, it quickly became clear that a number of different groups for Dutch people had previously existed in Austin. According to Henk Jan Wassenaar, last year's soccer World Cup was a perfect excuse to get together again. The contacts between people had fizzled out over the years due to a variety of circumstances, such as people moving away, kids had grown up and left and some people had died.

The new Austin Dutch Club on on the Meetup website was launched two months ago and now has 27 members. Victor Eijkhout is a computer scientist working at the University of Texas. He emigrated to the US from Nijmegen 20 years ago and has been living in Austin for the past six years.
Victor: “I've never had much contact with other Dutch people but I went along to the first Meetup gathering because I was curious to see who would show up".

To emphasize the fact that there was a vibrant community of Dutch expats in Austin once upon a time, Mireille Ghercioiu recalls that, “Once, Sinterklaas arrived in Austin on a boat,” in the time-honoured traditional way in which he arrives every December, back in Holland. Mrs Ghercioiu, originally from the Dutch village of Aarlanderveen, near Leiden, moved to Austin for a job in the high-tech industry 14 years ago. She has since married a Romanian and has met many other Dutch expats over the years.

“The groups were very specific; older immigrants, people with young children and so on, but they didn’t last long. I hope the new Meetup group can offer something to all the splinter groups so that the entire Dutch expats community can get together.”

(jric/imm)