In the chaos of her move, an Amsterdam woman accidentally put a precious figurine of her grandmother and other emotionally valuable items at a giveaway cabinet. She is now calling for it to be returned.
When the hectic pace of moving to a houseboat is over and Mieke de Hoop (38) unpacks her things, she breaks into a sweat: a white box containing items that she considers irreplaceable has been lost. She asks her brother-in-law, who helped carry it, if he still has the box, but the box is not in his car. When she walks back to the dike where the boxes were unloaded, she sees the box, but the stuff is gone.
“I was and still am in shock,” says De Hoop. The stuff is unloaded in a place where there is also a giveaway box. “We weren’t really paying attention. We had lifted the boxes out to lug them to my house. I or my brother-in-law then left the box with valuables next to the giveaway cabinet.”
It turns out to be a mistake with emotional consequences. Gifts from friends and family and things she bought on vacations are gone. The loss of a Saint Anthony statue that she received from her grandmother hurts the most.
,, It also concerns a rock crystal angel, a birth bracelet with my name on it, a woven bag from Papua, a jade pendant from my great-grandmother, stones from my birth house, a stone as a graduation gift, a saucer that I bought in Scotland and much more. The things don’t seem worth much, but they are to me.”
Cry very much
De Hoop has a hard time letting go of the loss. “I was crying a lot. But I still have hope that it will come back.”
She has hung a poster on the giveaway cabinet calling for the items to be returned. “Let me know and send me a picture so I can tell if the stuff is mine. I don’t get angry, of course, but I’m just very grateful if I get everything back.”
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