Different flavours [Nico's story]

Nico has been in Australia for 44 years. He got married in August, skipped the honeymoon, packed everything into boxes, and landed in Sydney on the 15 October 1982. He's never looked back, and he'll tell you it was God's hand the whole way.Joel and Braden sit down with Nico for a wide-ranging conversation that's part history lesson, part immigration story, part quiet testimony. He takes takes them through growing up in the Netherlands, where faith was woven into school, street, and daily life in ways that are almost unimaginable now.He explains the difference between patat and friet, why Dutch chips come with mayonnaise as the default, what Petit Oorlog, actually are, and how the whole thing traces back to Belgian and French debates that nobody has fully resolved. He talks about growing up in a village of 15,000 people with chickens and rabbits in the backyard, cycling 150 kilometres across a flat country to visit his uncle, and doing his civil engineering exams in fog so thick you couldn't see the telegraph pole across the road.He also talks about faith, not as a dramatic turning point, but as something that was simply always there. A Bible reading to start the school day. A Protestant church at one end of the village, a Catholic one at the other. The quiet sense of knowing that certain things weren't for him, without always being able to say exactly why.And then, at 26, a tea towel from Australia on top of a secondhand spin dryer — and a decision that would change everything.This is Part 1 of Nico's story.