Articol de Cristi Preda (foto) - Publicat joi, 09 februarie 2012 00:00 / Actualizat joi, 09 februarie 2012 13:44
After he broke his spine at 19, Erwin Hout was no longer able to completely use his hands and legs. But he graduated from University, became a manager within a company, got married and has three children. The Dutch man is Mihai Neşu’s friend. He has been living immobilized for almost two decades, 50 kilometres away from Utrecht. His story speaks about a different way of understanding suffering, forever separating the compassion of gestures from the pity of words.
In Erwin’s two-storey house plus attic, in Holland, there is a special elevator that the man trapped in a wheelchair uses to go upstairs to his daughters’ rooms. “The elevator helps me be a fulltime dad: I bring them to bed, I read them stories until they fall asleep.”
Adjusting the house to his present needs cost him 110,000 euro, out of which only 30,000 euro were provided by the local community: his marketing director earnings, combined with his wife Marleen’s geriatrician salary, were sufficient to cover the difference. From his wheelchair, Erwin is able to control the whole house: he opens doors, starts the DVD player, answers the phone, sets the temperature in the living room and closes the blinds. After a 9 years’ marriage, Marleen doesn’t do anything related to the household without consulting him first: “I am the head of the family, it’s only normal that things are like this”, he continues.
“My wife is always looking for inventions”
The love story between Marleen and Erwin started when the man was already completely paralyzed, after the accident he had suffered when he was 19. The two got married in 2003, when Erwin had just turned 29: “I was straightforward and I told her: if you want children, then find yourself another man! I thought I wouldn’t be able to have children. But, even more importantly, even if this could have been somewhat possible, I didn’t want it: why be in a situation where I wouldn’t be able to help them and torture myself about it?”
Marleen accepted. Not the situation, but Erwin’s convictions at that time. Today, they have a 7 years old daughter, Hannah, and two twin daughters aged 5, Lois and Elisa. Science has come up with a solution.
“My wife is always looking for the latest inventions which might help us modify something in our life or around the house. And it’s normal, it’s just like most people think about what they would like to get renovated”, Erwin says.
The believer economist
When he speaks about his family, Erwin adds in his speech, every two or three sentences, a long “God”, whose gravity is deepened by the Dutch accent. “I’ve been close to the Church since childhood, as I grew up in a traditional Catholic family. I knew God existed; now we’ve also met!” the man smiles kindly.
Going further than just his private belief, he has become the president of the Youth Council within the Catholic Church of Ridderkerk. Like in any other part of his life, he needs to take action, he cannot remain passive. Reading the Psalms is not enough, if he doesn’t help the children as well: this is, more or less, how Erwin the financier translates his relationship with his faith.
God makes breakfast, through His people
And the Church, beyond the miracle area, answers with tangible actions, inserted in Erwin’s daily schedule, which he presents to us in an accurate and conscientious manner: “I wake up at 7, when a nurse comes to help me wash up. She has been coming for 19 years and she’ll keep on coming until the day I die. At around 8 o’clock, a Church representative arrives and makes my breakfast; he then helps me get dressed and leave for the office, where work starts at 9 o’clock.”
The family’s car is adjusted, so that Erwin can get inside using a special ramp, without getting out of his wheelchair. “Technically, I could drive it myself. But sometimes I have spasms in my feet and it’s risky, with the acceleration and braking pedals”, our host comforts himself.
Marleen is absent from the morning schedule. “When you have three little children, one in school and two in kindergarten, you’ll understand why”, Erwin winks at me. In the evenings, after he gets home, his entire time is reserved for the girls: “I listen to their stories about their day, I go to the park and accompany them while they ride their bicycles, we play memory and attention games: I do everything a father does.”
Intimacy and a natural behaviour
In the evening, another nurse comes to take care of Erwin’s personal hygiene. “But intimacy is very important to me, so at least once every two weeks I call him and I tell him that his services are not required. Marleen and me, we take great care of the hours that we spend alone”, he says, just as he opens the door to their bedroom in order to show us how he gets into his bed and runs the house from up there, with the help of a device quite similar to the one set onto his wheelchair.
Intimacy has kept for him its primary and pure sense, without any kindness performed for the sake of being polite. In the bedroom, everything is extremely simple and ergonomically designed. He opens the door to the bathroom as well, pointing with his eyes: “A chair for the shower, the sink, while the remaining things are the usual stuff”. He finished showing me the ground floor; Hannah has been holding my hand all this time, anxious to show me her own room, on the first floor.
Dragon books between Bibles
The elevator’s cabin is two metre high, and is a metre and a half long on each side. Its doors open in the area between the living-room and the kitchen, the two open spaces which make up the ground floor. Erwin gets smoothly inside the elevator and shouts at us, amused: “Either with me, or up the stairs!” We choose the spiral with steep steps, guided by Hannah and by the two twins who have burst noisily into the house, as if from nowhere. We say hello as we walk up the stairs, and they give us a wide, bright smile.
Each golden fairy has her own room, like a true-blue princess. They show us their toys, they play with Erwin, they climb onto his wheelchair and kiss his forehead, his cheeks. The fourth room from this floor is meant for reading: shelves near shelves upon which Bibles sit next to albums about dinosaurs and dragons. Here, the father is the hero with modified wings, and the kids go silent.
“Next summer, we’ll renovate the Paradise”
“You know, my technology is kind of old”, Erwin seems a little embarrassed. We are back downstairs, and Hannah, Lois and Elise are putting on costumes, fascinated by Cristi’s camera. “All these devices are already two, maybe three generations behind, compared to the latest inventions, already put into practice. Next summer, I’ll change them, too”, he explains.
He talks about devices which are faster and easier to use by a paralyzed person, the girls have turned themselves into Barbie, Dragon and The Empress, the rain has stopped in Ridderkerk and the air coming in from the garden smells like rough spring. On the coffee table in the living-room lies a Dutch newspaper where, on the international news page, we know there is a picture of the street fights in Bucharest. We have seen it on the way over.
What Cristi’s lens and my words cannot render is a feeling, beyond Erwin’s worn out flesh and fresh mentality: in his home can still be found, untouched, the atmosphere from our grandparents’ house. The same aura of innocence, warmth and well-being, where nothing, absolutely nothing bad can happen to you. Not even if you are sitting in a wheelchair.
Marleen is busy in the kitchen, swarming like a bee between little clay pots filled with herbs, spices and many kinds of sugar. A thin light blends with the shadow of the things put back where they belong. One can only stumble, marvellously, upon a plush teddy bear or a pink scarf belonging to one of the twins. Erwin is gazing at the grass and he will, most certainly, devour the newspaper’s financial section when we’re gone. Even without being able to use his hands and feet. The little girls yawn, red in the cheeks, surrounding this house, from the humid South of Holland, with genuine, first-rate life.
“Yes, progresses are made in time. You have to wait and to practice for months on end, from the moment you feel a muscle vibrate and until you are able to use, more or less, a certain part of your body. But look, I am now able to scratch my nose and my eyes. Do you know how much this means?” - Erwin Hout
“I succeeded in becoming a father and this is a wonderful thing. The most important is that technology also helped me become a father in my children’s life. I can breathe next to my little girls, they can see me close. And the fact that we have so many people coming into our home helps the girls: they are more open and friendlier than their colleagues” - Erwin Hout
“In the last 11 years, since I started working, I never missed a single day from the office, for health reasons. When something breaks in the wheelchair and they come to fix it, I might be late or sometimes can’t make it at all. But it’s very hard for me at times like these - Erwin Hout
“What’s wonderful about all this technology which makes my life easier is the simplicity, the simple little things. For instance, I find it fascinating that this wheelchair that I sit in can be lifted high enough for me to be able to look into the eyes of the person that I’m talking to, that we can be at the same level. This is really important!” - Erwin Hout
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