Jennette Noel House - Amsterdam

 

 The first thing you’ll notice about the Jennette Noel House Catholic Worker is that unlike many CWs it isn’t a house at all. Rather its a series of apartments all connected to each other in the same building. You’ll recognize which door to enter though if you keep an eye out for the plants.

The Amsterdam CW, like many of the Catholic Workers of Europe, does hospitality for undocumented people but also organizes a large community garden and does plenty of protesting too.

Dutch and English are the common languages of their Monday evening meetings. Each week house cleaning chores are assigned and cooking nights doled out. Everyone in the house comes to these meetings and signs up to help with the house chores.

One practice the Amsterdam CWs do that I haven’t seen anywhere else is a very systematic effort that after dinner is finished EVERYONE helps do the dishes and clean the kitchen. There are two sinks where dishes happen, one for the big stuff like pots and pans and one for the smaller stuff like plates and cups. Someone else wipes the tables, still others put away leftovers or dry the dishes while another person cleans the stove. Even the kids “help” by dunking the clean dishes in the rinse water and then transferring them to the drying rack to drip off.

Many hands make light work and the kitchen winds up sparkling at the end of it all.

Prayer happens 2 or 3 times a day at Noel Huis on weekdays, both in the morning and at midday and also in the evening a couple times a week. They pretty regularly use the Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals book put together by Shane Claiborn and others.

Their chapel is in the center of the long hallway that makes up the house and is simply adorned. There is a bench that also serves as a prayer book shelf but most folks sit or kneel during prayer on the carpeted floor.

The community garden they help facilitate is the result of a slow moving into the space behind the local Catholic Church. “Could we plant one thing back there father?” turned into “couldn’t we  just put in one more plant. Nowadays they squat a huge area adjacent to the railroad tracks behind the church building and host bonfires and prayer there too! They don’t garden most of the space themselves, that’s mostly done by friends and former guests of the community who all have their own plot.

I got to come along for a pretty fun protest while visiting the Amsterdam CWs as they teamed up with the Christians for Climate Action to participate in Extinction Rebellion’s blockade of the road leading from parliament to the ministry of the economy and climate.

The police brought out three large water cannon equipped armored vehicles that they’d borrowed from Germany. While the pressure wasn’t set to painful, the water was quite cool and they hoped to chase people out of the roadway with it. Luckily the day was much warmer than March's previous XR blockade that the Amsterdam CWs had participated in earlier that year, plus the protesters were more ready this time too. When the water started they pulled out ponchos and rain coats and even swim suits and pool floaties. The gathering took on the vibe of a summer festival with music and beach volleyball games happening. Eventually the police started moving in and making arrests. A couple of the Amsterdam CWs were taken into custody but released without much excitement a little bit later.

The Amsterdam CWs also hosted the anti-nuclear Volkel peace camp I attended at the end of the summer.

More photos of Amsterdam CW

More photos of Extinction Rebellion Blockade