SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT: (l-r) Marie Jacqmin, Cemil Belek, Chiu-ling Kuo, Annelore De Donder and Tess Uytterhoeven are members of Woestijnvis' research team scoping the world for the Birthday Twins Project.

Do you think you're an outgoing, curious person with an interesting life story, do you? And perhaps you've sometimes wondered how life would be if you'd been born on the same day but somewhere else-let's say Belgium? And you want to be a TV star too?

Answer a confident "yes" to these three questions and the people at Woestijnvis, a Belgian television production company, would love to hear from you. But only if your birthday matches the list below-and you can prove it!

The idea for this 'birthday twins' project came from Steve Verhaeghe and Dirk Van den Houte, two Belgians who wanted to compare the lives of people of identical age all around the world. Woestijnvis liked the concept and selected 22 Belgians to take part.

Now the company is on a worldwide trawl to find interested people of the same sex who were born on the same dates. They have chosen 120 people from about 40 countries so far, and are hoping to find a few in Nepal.

For men, the dates are: April 29 1933 July 18 1984 July 19 1948 September 25 1949 February 11 1952 January 18 1956 May 5 1956 December 30 1960 July 24 1962 January 14 1965 January 27 1965 October 5 1968 February 5 1969 December 1 1971 May 3 1981

For women, the dates are: April 5 1943 May 2 1950 July 20 1963 March 24 1964 March 26 1975 December 27 1979 July 24 1982

"We are looking for Nepalis who would be interested in learning about Belgian customs and traditions," says Annelore de Donder at Woestijnvis.

Each Belgian participant will have three birthday twins from different countries, whom they will visit in turn to compare their different lives, cultures and environments. They will be able to see how their lives could have been totally different had they been born elsewhere. At the end, they will pick 10 Belgians with the most fascinating set of twins. Every visit will be filmed and the results will be broadcast in Belgium in the second half of 2009.

The production company will provide a Nepali-Dutch translator, so don't worry about your foreign language skills. But don't expect to be told too much about your Belgian twin in advance.

"We'd like the twins to be curious about each other and find out about their lives themselves," De Donder says.
Srishti Adhikari

If you are interested and your birthday matches, send an email to twins(at)docfish.be or call on +32 2 303 35 88.