Article
Senior Fellow Merel de Herder is the daughter of two fathers and one mother, but Dutch law has a narrow interpretation of family, with a maximum of two parents. Merel wanted to explore whether this narrow interpretation of ‘the family’ matches definitions from outside the Netherlands. Merel started her Action Project in the summer of 2017, when she and her father left the Netherlands by car to meet families along the way to Tajikistan and to find out who they saw as an indispensable part of their family. On their way, they drove through Germany, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The Pamir Highway was the highlight in Tajikistan and it brought them through Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, and Poland.
Her goal? To meet families along the way and find out who they saw as an indispensable part of their family.
