My first full-length radio documentary 'Take the Troubles away' (Drie weken zonder Troubles) aired on Dutch public radio with Radio Doc on November 24, 2019.

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For twenty years, a remarkable project took place in a small Dutch town called Hazerswoude Rijndijk. Teenagers from Belfast – half of them from a nationalist Catholic area, half of them from a unionist Protestant area – would stay with local host families for three weeks. In Belfast, their areas were separated by walls and barbed wire, in the Netherlands they shared one bedroom with the enemy.

 

The project was meant to bring the two sides of the Northern Irish conflict closer together, but no one knows what happened to the teenagers after they returned home. Inge Oosterhoff was still a toddler when her parents took part in this project. Now, thirty years later and on the brink of Brexit, she visits the two women who stayed with her family as teenagers, to find out how they look back on that strange vacation in the Netherlands.

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Listen to the full documentary here – bilingual transcript.

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You can also listen to a 3-min sample below and read along with the English transcript here.

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* Warning: sample contains spoilers!