Hey! Let me introduce myself first! My name is Arianne and I’m from Belanda. In Belanda I’m studying Social Work (Pekerjaan Social) and I’m now in my 7th semester. At this moment I’m doing my internship (magang) for Mitra Wacana. And as a part of my internship, I will tell you a little bit about Belanda.
In this article I will tell you about Social Work in Belanda.
In Belanda a lot of people work as a Social Worker. And there are a lot of jobs that a Social Worker can do. They can not only work in an NGO or at the government, but they can also work in (high)schools, elderly homes or in the facilities for handicapped. Also a lot of Social Workers work with children. For example, if the parents are unstable and can’t raise their child, a social worker will come to the family and help them.
In my experience Social Work is an informal job in Belanda, just like in Indonesia. The people who are a Social Worker do have a big heart for people. Meaning, they want to help people getting a better life. But in Belanda Social Workers think it’s very important to work together with the people. So instead of just helping the people, we want to work together with them to empower them. The goal is to teach them how to take care of themselves in the future. And I think that is a really good goal!
Now I’m going to tell you about one of the social problems that we have in Belanda. The reason I do this, is to give knowledge about that in western countries there are also problems in the society, just like in Indonesia. And of course, we can’t compare a western country with Indonesia. But it’s still good to know that a country as Belanda has its own problems.
One of the problems we have now is that there are a lot of old people (65+) in Belanda, and not enough young people to do all the jobs. So, in Indonesia it’s hard to get a job because there are so many people, but in Belanda there are a lot of jobs that are open. The reason that we have so many old people is because after World War 2 a lot of babies were born (we call that the baby boom generation). People had 5 until 10 children. But since it is really expensive to have that many children, from 1960/1970 people decided to have only 2 or 3 children. So what’s happening now is that the whole baby boom generation is not working anymore. And all the young people should fill their jobs. But there are not enough people to do all the jobs. So that’s why we have a lot of people from east Europe that come and work in Belanda. For example people from Poland, Bulgaria, Romania. And sometimes from Asia.
