Marietje

As canteen worker, she made sure the coffee was ready on time, cleaned the toilets and laundry room and did all the other work that went with her job. But for 'the boys', Marietje van den Belt (83) was above all a listening ear, someone they could laugh with and say anything to.

"It was a party every day", says Marietje when she thinks back to the more than eleven years she worked at Zuidberg from 1993 to 2004. "It was a lot of fun with the boys. It was all so easy, we were very friendly with each other. Everyone was equal and we could tell each other anything. Once, for example, someone complained about someone else being grumpy. No, boy," I said, "what makes you think so? That boy is just sad. He couldn't see that. And we had a lot of fun together, I laughed a lot. I said to them, 'Don't nag' or 'Move your ass'. That's how it was, wonderful!”

‘I flew over those things!’
Apart from Betty Zuidberg, Marietje was for a long time the only woman at Zuidberg, but she never saw that as a problem. On the contrary. "I was used to it. I come from Ens and have four boys of my own. I had no problem working among men who were all a lot younger than me. They didn't see me like that anyway, as an old woman, because I just went along with them."

There was a lot of laughter on all sides. "Oh, the time I came here with my car. There are these bumpers in front of the car park. There were boys outside waving when I drove up and I flew right over them! Everyone was laughing, of course. How is that possible, I asked, are you coming to help? Well, the whole lot arrived, all of them shouldering my car. That was great! Yes, we laughed about it for a long time."

‘If the bomb falls: flush it immediately’
With her disarming honesty and cheerful disposition, she solved problems in her own way. Like that time when a colleague caused discomfort among his colleagues. "He ate very different food from ours, with a lot more garlic," Marietje says. "I got complaints from the other guys when he went to the toilet. We all fainted when he went, they said, will you do something about it? Then at a staff meeting I said to him: it's just a little thing, and the colleague concerned started laughing, if you go to the toilet and the bomb drops: flush immediately. Well, you should have heard them, they were screaming with laughter! And the colleague in question loved it too, he wasn't angry with me."

‘I didn't leave until the job was done’
It was Betty Zuidberg who convinced Marietje to start working at Zuidberg. Marietje: "I ran into Mrs. Zuidberg on my bicycle one day. She asked if I still worked at the school. That was indeed the case. She offered me to come and work at Zuidberg. I thought about it for a while, because I really enjoyed working at that school with all the children, but I was up for something new.

Her working days started in the afternoon. "I started at half past two, quarter to three. First I made coffee and prepared all the cups. Then I did all the other work, cleaning the toilets, the laundry. I did the dirty work, but always made sure I stayed clean myself. My white clothes were still white after a day. And it smelled good, you know. I often put on a nice fragrance. Then the boys would come by, sniffing: hmmm, they would say. Marietje was a hard worker, nothing was too much for her. "I only left when I was finished. Sometimes I was working for an hour longer, but I didn't care, nobody was waiting for me at home anyway."

‘Otherwise, I would just be sitting at home by myself’
Marietje had become a widow at an early age. Moreover, by the time she started working for Zuidberg, four of her six children had flown the nest. "They were all working. Without my work at Zuidberg, I would have been sitting at home all alone. And I love a good time. This work allowed me to meet people. It was wonderful, a real outing. Looking back, after I retired, I thought: I could have stayed on. Yes, Zuidberg meant a lot to me."