Ingeborg Schlusemann - started as a social worker at AMOC in 1981, director of De Regenboog Groep in 2010 and 2011 and chairman of the board from 2007 to 2011
"When I came to Amsterdam from Germany in 1978, I knew nothing about drugs and prostitution, but that quickly changed as I went to live in the Nieuwmarkt neighborhood. Every day I was confronted with drug users, sitting, sleeping, using in cars, squats - or in my porch. I started volunteering, helped set up a crisis shelter for heroin prostitutes and in 1981 became a social worker at AMOC, then still on Prinsengracht.
About the Red Light District
I joined as a social worker, focusing on prostitution. Every day I walked the Red Light District on my way to work. I was also often at the streetwalkers' district in the evenings to make contacts and alert women to AMOC's services. Once a week we had a consultation hour together with the GG&GD in the clinic on Groenburgwal. This was well attended: on one evening often thirty to thirty-five German women came to be examined for venereal diseases. Sometimes they were pregnant. I talked to each of them and heard their life stories. It was quite intense what passed in three hours of expectations, frustrations, wishes, and suffering.
Home-tree-bird
When the AIDS epidemic began, the venereal disease clinic offered HIV testing. Women were kind of pushed to participate in that. As social workers, we were against that. We felt that everyone should use contraceptives anyway. We were also against testing because there were no drugs. When women heard on such a Wednesday night that they were HIV positive, their whole world collapsed. They all dreamed of having a big house, a big baby. One day I will be clean, have a husband and children and a normal life. That dream was shattered at once. Healing was not possible and they did not dare to have children because they could become infected during pregnancy.
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"When women heard they were HIV positive, their whole world collapsed."
Weekend away
Through a fund we once got five thousand guilders, of which I went to Center Parcs for a weekend with a group of heroin prostitutes. I had a bag full of methadone pills with me. The one who slept in the room with me was terrified that a pill would disappear and I would think she had nicked it. We went swimming, horseback riding and hiking, and sat talking to each other in front of the fireplace. It was a great weekend, no one wanted to go home again.
Incentive policy
People with AIDS often did not want to go back to their country of origin. Many had been here for years and completely alienated from the village they came from. Together with the GG&GD, we achieved that twenty-five sick people were granted residence permits. It was to prevent seriously ill people from loitering on the streets. We had to select them, which was very difficult, although they had to meet certain criteria. The residence permit, always for a year, entitled them to benefits and health insurance. At least that way they could die peacefully. It never succeeded in getting another group legal in this way. The government had a policy of discouraging foreigners, which it still does. We always had to negotiate with the doctor in question, and we depended on his goodwill to get methadone.
Solve ourselves
There were no limits to our work and hours. We helped with moves, held relationship discussions with the partner, were involved in raising the children: you did whatever was necessary. For at least ten years we worked this way. On an annual basis, we accompanied about twelve hundred German women. We had few staff, we worked our asses off. We brought children to a home and then the father threatened us with firearms, but we couldn't leave him with them either. One baby died of crib death. That's where you went, because that woman had no one else. We could not refer. We had to solve all the problems ourselves.
Lobby
Of course, we believed that the solution did not lie only in Amsterdam. Therefore, we lobbied hard with institutions, government agencies and politics in Germany to change the policy there. That finally succeeded, after twenty years. After that, far fewer German drug users came to Amsterdam and we were able to focus on other foreigners. That makes the work more complicated, because we don't know the social map of every country. With some it is difficult to communicate, due to language differences or psychiatric problems. But in essence, little has changed in the nature of the problems of people who have no rights here. In Amsterdam, it remains a coming and going of people, looking for a better life."