Jaco Visagé

Jaco Visagé lives in the Netherlands since February 2022, together with his wife Karen and daughter Aimee. Read more about Jaco and his experiences.

Jaco, why did you emigrate to the Netherlands?
We decided on the Netherlands as the culture is similar to that of our Afrikaans culture we grew up with. In Barneveld where we currently live it feels like when both myself and my wife grew up. South-Africa is an amazing place but in recent years the increase in pace of decay in South-Africa forced me and my wife to make a decision around the future of our daughter. Another reason is that the Netherlands is a great place to explore the rest of Europe.

Can you tell us something how you do like the Netherlands?
We are starting to enjoy the Netherlands as we are getting more settled in each week. There are many places to explore and many new things to get used to. The language is really not as easy as you might think, being Afrikaans helps with your vocabulary but that is about it, the rest you need to learn. One of the first things we noticed was how clean it was, very little to no rubbish. The houses are different, huge open windows, no fences or burglar bars. The Netherlands caters for bicycles everywhere, everything is within an acceptable range, and yes there are not many hills. Things work in the Netherlands, no load shedding, no recurring water interruptions.

Please tell us something about the projects you are currently working on.
I am currently working as a software engineer for a client that develops and implements communication software for businesses. We recently started to migrate the technology stack over .NET 6 and .NET Blazor.

Did the process of emigration go smoothly?
The whole process went as planned without any issues, summit developers arrange everything and helped us along the way from landing at Schiphol to getting our resident cards from the IND in Utrecht a few weeks later.

Can you explain to the South Africans who are considering to go overseas how you did experience the support from us?
In my opinion Summit is amazing, 10 out of 10. summit developers assisted us in choosing a school for our daughter, they helped us get a place to stay. They went the extra mile and helped us with our container that arrived 2 weeks earlier than expected, even before us. Paulien, Matthijs and Ton really help where they can, you can send a message or call and they will help.