Great outdoors I was born in 1976, in the Dutch part of Belgium, and grew up in a small village in the countryside called Melle, close to Ghent. I have three siblings – an older and a younger brother and we were a foster family for my sister, so my mum was very busy. We lived in a run-down house in the countryside that my parents had bought and were always improving. My dad was self-employed and worked in the car industry. There were financial struggles and we didn’t grow up in a privileged environment. As a child I had a couple of goats, dogs and chickens. Our holidays were spent outside – camping in the garden, going fishing. I really grew up outside, quite in the wild. I rode my bike to school in Ghent through the rain and wind. My dad was tough on my sister and I; we just had to get on with things, no different from our brothers, and were expected to repair the sheds in the garden, paint the walls or cut the grass. I learned that women are equal to men, that we can do the same things physically. Walk in the park When I was 16, I got involved in organising activities for undocumented migrant children and ethnic minority kids on Saturdays at the Don Bosco Homework Support Centre. We made pancakes and went to the park and played games like hide and seek. It wasn’t easy to engage the girls, especially the Muslim girls, but we did home visits and talked to the parents and then some of them were able to come. We also took them to the countryside for a week-long summer camp. It wasn’t always easy. I remember getting a scare one night when I was 18. I left the centre in the evening and found some young men with baseball bats sitting on my old Volvo. They said, “What are you doing in this neighbourhood? You are white, you shouldn’t be here.” I told them I worked at the centre and, fortunately, one of the boys said his little brother went to the centre and he thanked me. After that, every Saturday I had my parking spot. That day in New York I went to Université Catholique de Louvain, in Louvain-La-Neuve, to study law. I was the first person in my family to go to university. Belgium is small, so at the weekend, I went back to work at the centre. In the end, I worked more with undocumented adults, mentoring them to go to school, go to university. I always had side jobs to earn money, working in tea rooms and cleaning an elderly centre, which was an eye-opener to the mental health world. Profile: Why NGO head got Richard Branson, Ban Ki-moon to live like refugees My cousin introduced me to my husband, Sebastian, when I was at law school. He was working as a lawyer. After five years of legal studies, I graduated in 1997 and got a scholarship to study in the United States. First I worked for 18 months in Brussels at a small law firm and then I applied for a master’s in law at New York University. Sebastian and I married in 2000 and we went to New York together. On September 11, 2001, we were on Mercer Street and Broadway and saw the Twin Towers collapse. It was traumatising, people were trying to help, but the bodies were buried under the rubble. After I’d finished my master’s, I stayed on and worked at an international law firm in private equity and funded Sebastian’s master’s in law at Columbia University. The family way I was transferred with my law firm back to Brussels in mid-2003 and also did a lot of pro bono work on immigration law, which I loved. Our first child, Maxine, was born in 2004. I was working crazy hours when I was pregnant with our second child. My boss asked why I wanted another child – it wasn’t a supportive environment to work in, so I left and stayed home with my children for just over a year and a half. Sebastian was working a lot in Beijing, going back and forth, and we moved there in 2009. I arrived with three children under the age of five. The kids went to school and I found the tai tai environment of lunches and shopping wasn’t for me. I studied Chinese, started a distance-learning course on sustainable development with SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London and began running. Initially it was to discover the neighbourhood and then I went further and further out. It can be infuriating to see how unwanted and forgotten [refugees] are in Hong Kong Virginie Goethals, co-founder, RUN In 2011, I ran the Great Wall half marathon and came second. Some friends signed up for the Gobi March, a 250km race over several days, and I trained for that and joined them. Taking a hike I’d started working part time for China Greentech Initiative, a think tank, when we decided to move to Hong Kong. I loved living in Beijing, the people were so friendly, but the pollution was becoming a problem . I remember being in a Decathlon store and the pollution was so bad I couldn’t see the end of the shop. We arrived in Hong Kong in 2014 and it was a bit of a shock. My first impression was that money is the benchmark for everything you do; it didn’t resonate with me. I interviewed with a law firm, but was soon distracted by other events. In Beijing, a friend had asked me to help her with a project she was running for the NGO Free to Run in Afghanistan. When I arrived in Hong Kong, I went over there two times to help her organise projects. That friend got a request to organise a hike for refugee women who were victims of sexual violence through Justice Centre Hong Kong and I organised a hike to The Peak. At the end, the ladies said, “See you next week.” I had a good gut feeling about it, so I said goodbye to the legal work and started organising a weekly hike for the women through the Justice Centre. We also organised some running on the track in Wong Chuk Hang. It was initially a Free to Run chapter but, in 2018, we rebranded it as RUN – Rebuild, Unite and Nurture. Physical therapy Our priority is to focus on women who are victims of sexual violence and we also got some male referrals, torture victims. Initially we started with 12 women and four or five men. It grew quickly and at the moment we are serving 163 people in total – 20 men, almost 60 women and the rest are children. We specialise in trauma and rehabilitation because the government doesn’t provide such services for victims of torture. We try to fill that gap using sport as a linchpin – hiking and running help them recover mental and physical strength. Some of them recovered quickly and asked what to do with their life, so we added education. The human cost of Covid-19 Sadly, with Covid the level of trauma we have seen is going through the roof; it is horrendous. I’ve worked in intranational law firms with very demanding partners, but I’ve never worked as much as I have done in the past 18 months. I’ve been working pro bono for more than five years and it’s hard, it takes a toll on you mentally when you see poverty, when you have to review cases of extreme levels of torture and sexual violence. I have amazing colleagues who help me a lot, but you sometimes wonder, where is the humanity? It can be infuriating to see how unwanted and forgotten they are in Hong Kong. Why Hong Kong’s leading education reformer is thinking of turning to TikTok The suicide rate is quite high because of the desperation and recently there have been quite a lot of suicides in the refugee community in Hong Kong. Open doors We have so much demand we could double the programme tomorrow. We try to keep our costs as low as possible. Our biggest costs are transport and food. We work with NGOs such as Feeding Hong Kong , who support us, and with volunteers because we are thinly staffed. It’s the community support that the refugees feel here, the love. When we are hiking and you need to climb a mountain, only your legs are going to carry you. That’s a message to the women, we are here to help you but only you can do it. It gives them a boost, a sense of achievement, and the endorphins kick in. Our work is not easy, but it is rewarding. My grandfather was a refugee from Hungary. I was very close to him as a child. He lived in the countryside and always slept with the door of his house open. When I asked him whether he worried about burglars he said, “If people come inside and take something it’s because they need it.” He never closed his door. It’s something we all need to remember – to stay open and keep our eyes open. If you are having suicidal thoughts, or you know someone who is, help is available. For Hong Kong, dial +852 2896 0000 for The Samaritans or +852 2382 0000 for Suicide Prevention Services. In the US, call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on +1 800 273 8255. For a list of other nations’ helplines, see this page