My two worlds

I, Nathalie Toisuta, was born from 2 different worlds. Dutch East Indies with the Moluccas and the Netherlands. Maybe three different cultures and systems?

Arrival in the Netherlands

In 1951, my father, 10 years old, along with 12,500 other Moluccan families, left Indonesia. With the expectation that they would return after a few months when the Netherlands was out of negotiations with the new Indonesian government and the Moluccans would have their own state. Upon arrival in the Netherlands, the Moluccan KNIL soldiers were told that they had been discharged from the army. Suddenly, everyone had become unemployed. It felt to the soldiers, like betrayal. They had always stood by the Netherlands, and now they were being discarded by that same country. Eventually it turned out that the Netherlands could also not fulfill its promise to give the Moluccans an independent state so they never returned and had to stay in the Netherlands forever.

After several years, my father met my Dutch mother. They married 14 years after my father, as a 10-year-old boy arrived in the Netherlands. They had three daughters of whom I am the middle one.

My 2 cultures

"Your personal story is rooted in the story you came from. You stay connected to your system of origin, to where you grew up, to who was at the cradle of your story. With the people who were there and were missing. With the spirit of your ancestors, with their history and the lessons they learned; with the land and culture of origin."

- Excerpt from the book The Healing Story

Drawing was created by Tina Scoon. For more info, see: www.partofthesystem.com