A residential care home in Stekene (East Flanders) is looking for a chat buddy for one of its residents, 90-year-old Henk De Boer, who is originally from Amsterdam, the commercial capital of the Netherlands. Unfortunately, Henk does not understand the Waasland District dialect and gets a little lonely.
Henk now hopes to find a regular conversation partner, who shares his accent. The appeal has already borne fruit, as the residential care home has already received calls from people from across Flanders, including often people from the Netherlands.
‘I have difficulty communicating with other residents and that's why I often feel lonely,’ 90-year-old Henk tells VRT. ‘One of the staff then came up with the idea of posting an appeal on Facebook and I thought that was a very good idea, because I always say: nothing ventured, nothing gained.’
The idea comes from An-Sofie, the remedial therapist at the residential care home. She wants to prevent Henk ending up in social isolation. ‘He is looking for someone he can understand without any difficulties, because now he often has to guess what other fellow residents are saying to him’.
The gritty Amsterdammer initially had little hope that the appeal would garner much response, but nothing could be further from the truth. ‘Our phone is red hot,’ says a residential care home official. ‘We are getting emails and phone calls from people from across Flanders, some even from the Netherlands.’