Delft Mama of the week, Miriam, is highly involved in various children’s activities in the city. She has been attending the playgroup on a weekly basis with her daughter Freddy (3) from the first week they arrived in Delft two years ago. During the spring, Miriam and her husband Nathan, volunteered to work with the refugees through Welkoms Maaltijd and have enjoyed it immensely. “I care passionately about the refugees and I really want to be able to do something with them. With DMM I had an opportunity to start: the previous coordinator was moving away and she was looking for someone to take on the role. I thought it was a great opportunity. My experience working in charities and in management in general, my interest in this area, and also having lived in countries that weren’t my home, all give me a tiny bit of an insight into what people might need when arriving in a foreign country. The Welkoms Maaltijd format might change after the summer break, but I do hope we will be able to keep it going in some way, and I can continue contributing in the future.”
Miriam and Nathan spend a lot of family time together with their daughter. They used to attend an English music class for children in The Hague, but when it was cancelled, the couple with a musical background started thinking about giving it a try themselves. They were kindly encouraged to copy what they liked about the original class, and so the English music class for children, Singing Delftlings, was born. “It’s going pretty well. We have had two sessions so far. We had a farm theme the first week and last Sunday we had a water theme. We had nearly twenty kids each week. We are just trying out different things for the first month to see what works and what doesn’t. We are currently at Klieder on Sunday mornings.”
As a profession, Miriam has a background in art conservation, but she left her job when Freddy was born. “We wanted her to have one of her parents at home while she was young, so that was perfect timing with our move to Delft. Now it has been nearly three years and the time away from my career has really made me re-examine all of that. Now I have my own brand, Made by Mim. It’s something I had I wanted to do for ten years. I came up with the logo years ago and got around to buying the domain name a year ago. Just the other week I thought I could actually make some progress on it all, so I created a Facebook page. It took me a week to get eight years worth of photos up onto the page. In the last month I’ve been making things, too. I took a ceramics course, which is something I’ve been dying to do for years. I had all these ideas and I turned up to the ceramics class knowing all the different techniques and materials I wanted to try out. I was quite pleased with some of the things I made in the class. I did art conservation at university, partly because there was no guarantee of a professional career doing a Fine Arts degree, but I would’ve loved to try succeeding at being an artist. People who do fine arts aren’t necessarily successful unless they are truly remarkably talented and lucky. While Nathan’s working and I’m at home, it gives me the opportunity to be the “starving artist” for a little while, experiment and see how far I get. I really love making both beautiful and useful things.”