The idea is to hold eleven dinners in eleven villages
Translated by Racheal Adeniyi
In an initiative to bring people in small villages closer together, TV and radio personality Petra Possel from Gaast and her husband Pieter Hubregtse are working on a series of dinners, each to be held in a different village, and where everyone in the village is invited.
Possel is a journalist and presents, among other things, the culinary radio show Mangiare on Radio 1 while Pieter, her husband, is a private chef at Kookatelier Zuiderzee.
When Possel moved to Gaast (Sudwest-Fryslân) a few years ago, she had already organised such a dinner twice before. Now she wants to do the same in other villages around Friesland. When she held the dinners in Gaast, 65 out of 200 inhabitants participated. Possel thought that this brought togetherness and unity amongst the people despite the lack of essential facilities in smaller villages.
“A lot of club life has been lost or reduced in the smaller villages. Fewer people live there, and there is less community spirit. Then it’s nice to meet each other at dinner. That’s a very nice connecting factor.”
The two three-course dinners in Gaast cost 7.50 euros, but Possel actually wants these eleven dinners to be free for the inhabitants. “Then we have to talk to the villages if they can make a small contribution, or then we have to ask for money for dinner”, she says. No villages have yet been selected for the dinners, but the intention is to find villages all over the province. Possel and Hubregtse are looking for small villages with only a few hundred inhabitants, who do have their own village pub or café. There must of course be room to organise the dinner.
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