The abduction of Caramen T.

Looking for a school.
August 20th, 2018

In Thailand, I tried already to gather information about a school for my daughter.

I had a good friend in Belgium, Juan Reyes from the non-profit association Genesis, who was working at the local community in Genk as a coordinator in helping people who had been for a long time jobless.

In Belgium, I contacted him for a meeting and asked him which possibilities Belgium offered for my daughter to learn something while she was in Belgium.

He went with us to an office which was designed to help immigrants to integrate in Belgium and they gave me the necessary information and made the necessary contacts with schools for us.

There were 2 “OKAN” schools, “Onthaal Klassen voor Anderstalige Nieuwkomers (Welcome Classes for Foreign Language Newcomers)”, that were qualified for my daughter.

One was located in Genk and the other was located in Hasselt.

I received a mail from the school in Genk, inviting us to come to the "OKAN"school in Genk or in Hasselt and receive further information.

I asked them for information and almost everything was OK, except that both schools were located far away from Diepenbeek.

How could my daughter go and come back from school?

A 16 years old child, who did not speak a word Dutch and was in a country which was totally strange to her.

My daughter was not the kind of person to let her go alone in Belgium.

In Thailand, she had a lot of accidents and nearby misses, so I was not keen to let her go alone anywhere.

As a father, I was not very keen to let my daughter go alone from Diepenbeek to a school in Genk or Hasselt and back.

Also, it was already September, and the days were shortening.

Most of the travelling would happen in the twilight.

I asked the school if they had a solution to this problem.

Their answer was exactly the same of what I already knew, "get the public transport".

On 3 September, the school sent me an email to ask if I made already a choice.

I was so pissed off by these Belgian laws and send the school a raw answer.

I asked my brother if he would accept to drive my daughter to school and get her back after school, but his answer was that they had only 1 car and his wife needed the car to go to work.

Also, he had other, more important, things to do than being a babysitter.

“She was old enough to go on her own to school. Many other kids, far younger than her went every day to school on their own” was his answer.

Oddly enough, the same person, Luis Trivino, would claim barely 1 month later that "he found a school for my daughter (this school) and brings/collects my daughter every day from/to school.

The claim of my brother that he did find a school and was driving my daughter to school every day.

Translation:

"TRIVINO Y GARCIA Abelardo was in hospital for 4 weeks.
In the meantime, TRIVINO Luis has taken care of the daughter of TRIVINO Y GARCIA Abelardo.
Because Carmen is now in Belgium longer than the originally intended term, TRIVINO Luis enrolled her at school.
He brings and fetches her every day."

It became very clear to me that asking my brother anything about my daughter was only fuelling the hatred he had already about us.

I contacted Karel Vandervorst, who was living in Mechelen with his Thai wife and their daughter, if it would be possible to let my daughter study at the same school as his daughter.

His daughter was studying at a boarding school and thus my daughter would not be with my brother while I was in the hospital.

But that would require us to go to the school to meet the directors and make all the arrangements for staying at the school.

Time was too short for this.

I asked also the schools if they had any students living in Diepenbeek and if it would be possible for my daughter to travel to school with them (sharing transport).

But their answer was: “We can not give you that information because of to the “Privacy Laws””.

I received about the same answer from the other school.

Information about shared transport was impossible to obtain from a school in Belgium.

An other possibility would be to hire a taxi to bring my daughter to school in the morning and collect her in the evening.

I know a few taxi companies which I used before in Belgium and I informed about the price for this service.

A quick calculation gave me:

  20 x 2 =   40 Euro/day;
  40 x 5 = 200 Euro/week;
200 x 4 = 800 Euro/month.

For a pensioner, this was a little bit too much.

I contacted also the instances for receiving the children benefit.

The whole system had changed a lot since the last time I was living in Belgium.

Their answer was very short and clear.

If I was receiving a Belgian pension, I had to fill in an application and send it to the child benefits department.

By the time I went to the hospital, I had still not found a solution for the school of my daughter.

In Thailand, this would have been “peanuts” to find a school and to arrange transport.

I also tried to find a place where my daughter could continue her studies of Aikido and Muay Thai.

I found an Aikido club nearby the house of my brother and the Aikido practices would be on Wednesday and Friday from 18:00hr till 21:00hr.

The Aikido center in Genk.

20180820 110242, Aikido club.

But the problem of mobility raised up again.

My brother did not want to do this trip with my daughter and according to him, Martial arts were a complete waste of time.

The place was too far away to send a young girl of 16 years who had never been to that country and didn’t know the language alone in the night.

The route from the house to the school.