Editing Henk van Hetten (section)

== Early life ==

Henk van Hetten was born in Paramaribo, [[Suriname]], on 23 July 1963. He is the son of [[Wijnand van Hetten]] and [[Rosalie Kenswil]].<ref name="wijnand-personal"/> His father managed the Van Hetten family dump site in Paramaribo, where Henk's uncle [[Ewald van Hetten]] worked as a heavy equipment operator.

Van Hetten began helping at the dump site in 1975, when he was 12. He first sorted reusable material and later helped maintain equipment. Wijnand taught him construction work. Ewald introduced him to the cranes and excavators used on the property.

After completing secondary school, Van Hetten obtained a vocational qualification in motor-vehicle mechanics. In 1980, aged 17, Ewald began training him on a used Kobe Steel 10KT truck crane. Van Hetten used it to load scrap and reusable construction material before moving on to the dump site's Kobelco 300-series lattice-boom crawler crane.

From 1981 until 1984, Van Hetten worked as a parcel courier. He moved alone to [[Rotterdam]], [[Netherlands]], in 1984 to gain more construction experience. There he worked for a Dutch construction company on precast concrete piling and steel sheet-pile installation. During his six years in Rotterdam, he completed SOMA training and qualified to operate mobile piling installations and mobile cranes.