Rotterdam       With a new ACORN affiliate, WUUNE, in Brussels and emerging organizations where we have fraternal relations in Wallonia, the French-speaking sector of the country, it made sense to take advantage of the train going through the central station on my route from Paris to Rotterdam.  I managed to catch several hours with Arnaud Bilande, our organizing sparkplug in Belgium.

Arnaud took on the task of making sure I finally had a better and more complete grasp of what we were doing in Belgium, along with what he saw where the opportunities there and across Europe.  One of the pleasures of meeting with Arnaud, that is very helpful, is that he speaks with his fingers, so to speak.  I don’t mean with constant gestures.  Instead, he has a rare drawing talent.  I have looked over his shoulder in the past at international meetings.  He doesn’t doodle, but produces amazing sketches of people and events.  When briefing me on Belgium that meant that a pen never left one hand and a small notebook the other, so that he could draw physical representations of what he was describing to me while talking.

For me the result was finally seeing how groups, largely of tenants, were forming in four different smaller cities in Wallonia, as he drew a map of the area and pinpointed the towns.  A key effort has been in Charleroi, a former coal mining town with 25% unemployment, and issues abound.  Other groups are forming in Namur, sort of the capital of the region, Liege, and elsewhere.  Arnaud walked me through where each stood, and the early efforts to increase communications between them on common issues, where they existed, as well as building a bridge to the work in Brussels. Retrofits or rehabilitation of substandard homes is a key issue, but tenants are stuck if displaced with no real alternatives in better or more affordable housing stock, so often find themselves forced to suffer through the situations.

WUUNE ACORN had been part of a large, annual housing rights march over the recent weekend, which had fired up the members, so it was great to see their pictures on their Facebook site.  More exciting was hearing about a recent court decision which finally established an enforcement mechanism for tenants to appeal and potentially lower their rents, if they can make the case.  It seems housing units are classified by size, bathrooms, balconies, and other amenities and assigned a level of rent by the government.  If a tenant is in a unit that rents for 1000 euros for example and the criteria justifying that rent is not met, the tenant will now have a process whereby they can appeal their rent to the government as being below the standard for the unit, and then receive a reduction.  Until the court decision finally put some teeth in the system, a tenant could make a complaint, but couldn’t either force the landlord to make changes or win a rent modification.  Now the door is wide open for change, and a huge organizational opportunity for us to mount a campaign for tenants to make seize the time now.

Without a doubt I left for Rotterdam in the early afternoon armed with a much better understanding of what we were doing and where we were going.  I mentioned to Arnaud that despite the fact that I had asked for the meeting so I could get a handle on the new affiliate and make sure it was on track, I now wondered if he had sought the meeting instead to organize me better on Belgium’s laundry lists of issues and interests.  It didn’t matter.  It was to-MA-to versus to-MAT-o, and all the same, proving once again, no matter the inspiration, that there’s no substitute for getting on the ground in getting a grip on organizing.  Having it also drawn on paper for me was lagniappe.