Roots Guide: The Dutch Stories

In Autumn 2018, Meghann Ormond joined forces with social entrepreneurs Ingi Mehus and Daniel Wurpel of Pocket Stories, photographer Rehab Eldalil and photographer/designer Hamzah Kashash to create an educational tool for social inclusion in the form of a travel guidebook: Roots Guide: The Dutch Stories.

‘Who am I? And where do I belong?’ In this rapidly-changing, fast-paced world, these questions have come to increasingly confound us. We are paradoxically both more connected to and more disconnected from one another than ever before. Overwhelmed by it all, many of us crave ways in which to genuinely connect -- and re-connect -- with the people and places around us. We sense that we not only need to see the world differently but also to be in the world differently.

Roots Guide: The Dutch Stories is a novel tool developed to help us do this. Taking the form of an interactive, reflective travel guidebook, Roots Guide invites us to undertake both outer and inner journeys by revisiting what we think we know about life in the Netherlands, starting on our very own doorsteps. It welcomes us into the lives of our Roots Guide hosts -- more than 60 people with extraordinarily diverse backgrounds living all over the country today.

Learn about what brought our hosts to the places in which they live and their experiences of these places. And, along the way, get great travel tips and recommendations that shed new light on the weird, wonderful, woeful and wily aspects of contemporary life in the cities and regions we call home.

Roots Guide is for everyone who lives in the Netherlands and is curious to explore themselves and their place in this country in a new way. Experience and connect with people and places just next door or all the way across the country you thought you already knew like the back of your hand, ones you’ve never heard of, and perhaps even ones you may have feared.

Through stories, suggested journeys and guided multisensory reflective activities specially designed for its readers, Roots Guide opens us up to different ways of seeing and being in our Netherlands, not the Netherlands as some mythical fixed place and culture to which we either belong or don’t belong.

Are you ready to begin your journey?