THE coronavirus has brought upside down in everyone’s lives. It alienates people and has made them more lonely. But every rule has its exceptions… For Jacqueline Tolu, a 98-year-old Frenchwoman, and Eliot Belman, a 20-year-old student living at his parents’ home in England, the pandemic worked differently, brought them closer and made them friends .
Tolu experiences isolation in the nursing home where she lives near Paris due to the restriction of visits during the pandemic, while Belman’s plans to be in Paris this year for studies in French were shattered by the new coronavirus.
For the past six months, however, the two have been having weekly Skype chats, thanks to a project called Shareami that brings older seniors into contact with language learners.
Tolu now has someone to talk to and relieve her loneliness and Bellman has a chance to practice his French with someone whose mother tongue is. But beyond that, they are doing well.
«I was anxious to meet a new person, a completely different generation, a different culture, a different languageSays Belman, who is in his third year of studying French, Spanish and Japanese at the University of Warwick in Britain.
“But as soon as I started talking to her, she was a very good interlocutor, she is very funny, the conversation with her always flows comfortably”, he added, as broadcast by the Athens News Agency, to conclude: “We made a friendship”.
Yesterday, Monday, Bellmann called her for the weekly chat they have from his room at his parents’ house in Kent, in the south of England, where he is going through the pandemic period. Tolu answered him from nursing home in Boneig-sur-Marne, sitting in a wheelchair.
Belman showed Tolu an origami goose he had made, she asked him how he was going to study Japanese and recounted memories of the Normandy Landing in 1944, which he lived near the Norman shores when he was young.
Tolu says their conversations allow her, at least in her mind, to escape the limitations of a nursing home for a while each week. “It gives me great joy,” he adds.
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