A tourist survives for two and a half weeks in remote Spanish mountains and charities have a bumper year. Dutch youth is consumer mad, asylum seekers face ‘repatriation’ and a cyclist comes a cropper. It’s all in the Dutch dailies.

A Dutch miracle
The papers deal with the dearth of big domestic news in their differing ways this morning. The Dutch woman who survived in the mountains of the Costa del Sol for 18 days without food makes it to the front pages of two of the more populist papers.

De Telegraaf treats us to a dramatic picture of Mary-Anne Goossens being carried over rocky terrain by a Spanish rescue worker. Trekkers came upon her by chance, we are told, after she had got hopelessly lost in the remote area.

She was weak from lack of food but had been able to drink from a mountain stream. The Dutch doctor now treating her in a Spanish hospital says she’s in remarkable shape considering her ordeal: “She must have been in very good condition to begin with”.

AD also gives Ms Goossens the front-page treatment. Under the headline “Miraculous”, it immediately plunges us into the family drama. Ms Goossens’ son Fritz and daughter Jantje had almost given up hope. But, yesterday, were finally able to hold their mother in their arms, the paper gushes.

“I’m so happy,” Fritz tells us. “It’s a wonder that my mother is still alive - a wonder, which we kept on believing in.”

Dutch charities bounce back
De Volkskrant plumps for making its own news. The paper leads with its ‘annual research’, which shows that Dutch charities have bounced back after going through a crisis year in 2009. After that year of “stagnation”, donations to the country’s 25 biggest charities increased by an average of 4.2 percent.

Top of the list is the KWF cancer fund which topped the 100 million-euro mark for donations in 2010 for the first time ever. The Dutch branch of Médecins Sans Frontières also did well, with its revenues increasing by over 24 percent.

De Volkskrant explains that the collection box is a thing of the past, with charities turning en masse to organising extreme sporting events to drum up donations. Volunteer contestants raise the money by being sponsored for their sporting performance and endurance.

A charity expert says the trend still has a long way to go in the Netherlands. “Sponsored sport accounts for 10 percent of donations in the US. In the Netherlands, the figure is still under one percent.”

Consumer-mad youth
Today’s Trouw also leads with ‘news’ about society in general. Large numbers of young people, it says, are embroiled in a contest with each other over who has the latest and best consumer goods. It warns they are getting themselves hopelessly into debt in the process.

The paper bases its report on figures from around 1,000 budget advice sessions held by colleges of further education in Amsterdam in 2010. The young people, from 18 to 27, had average debts of 8,700 euros. Many of those seeking help had “no idea” of how much they owed or how many creditors they had.

They had borrowed money to pay for clothes, shoes and other “accessories”, but the very latest smartphones, with their expensive and complicated payment deals, were singled out for blame.

Many students claim they are so heavily in debt – presumably after splashing out on smartphones – that they can no longer find the money to pay for essential equipment for their courses. And, an Amsterdam politician fears, “this is just the tip of the iceberg”.

Asylum seekers’ Dutch children
“I come from Hilversum, I don’t want to go back to Sierra Leone”, reads the headline in nrc.next. It highlights the plight of asylum seekers’ children who, if not actually born in the Netherlands, have spent most of their lives here.

About 2,000 children of asylum seekers have grown up in the Netherlands, go to school here, speak the language and consider themselves Dutch. But they’ve got to ‘return’ to their parents’ country of origin which they barely know, says the paper.

The government is implementing a tougher approach to the repatriation of failed asylum seekers. Meanwhile, an opposition MP plans to introduce draft legislation ensuring that failed underage asylum seekers who have been in the country for more than eight years will be allowed to stay. That is unless they or their parents have caused the delay in repatriation themselves.

Dutch hope in Tour pile-up
The Dutch are cycling mad, and the Tour de France gets major coverage in the press. Dutch Tour hope, Robert Gesink, was involved in a bad pile-up – one of many – yesterday. Coming off the bike is all part of cycling, says AD, but yesterday was too much even for the toughest sportsmen.

“Gesink battered” is the paper’s headline above a photo of the Dutch cyclist, clothes ripped and covered in blood, limping off after the race. De Telegraaf prefers to give the story a more upbeat spin: “Lucky escape”, is its verdict. Gesink’s back injury and the gash to his elbow, which required stitches, could, we’re told, have been a lot worse.