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07.11.2023

Blog 5 : Storytime - Humanitarianism + Surviving Jeugdzorg (CPS)

Those that have read the intro on my homepage know that besides modeling, I also used to do social work in the community at the Foster Care Department between 2019 and 2022. This blog is about what and who influenced the humanitarian in me.

One of my biggest wishes has always been to become so stable and secure that I can build houses for children without a safe or happy home. And then do things my way.
That’s, of course, because of my childhood experiences.
Although the next story, my version of “surviving jeugdzorg” (the child protective service) also has a lot to do with it,

TRIGGER WARNING! You can still click off.  

The last blog ended with me leaving my foster family and staying at my homegirls’s place a couple blocks away.
After that, the child protective service found another family, where I stayed for a little while. Then I moved home to my dad. Even though I was happy to be back, I still always felt different, and the stepmom issues were still there. So yeah, bad idea.

My then-social worker got me a place at a so-called “supervised - independent living complex”. From there on, I was supposed to get my first independent place, but the list was long and the complex was already overpopulated.
This is still a problem in 2023, btw. 

To my beloved copycats, feel free to copy this subject. I promise I won’t be mad!

My then-social worker suggested this project in France, in the middle of nature in Burgoyne. 
I would stay there for a minimum of 6 months away from the mainland, surrounded by “supportive foster families,” to work on myself and my life goals.
That ended up being a nightmare.
Organizing the trip was a pain in the ass. Looking back now, I think that was a sign from God that I shouldn’t have gone in the first place. 

When I finally arrived in France after a 9-hour drive, we figured out that my foster family was still on vacation. I was then brought to a Dutch hippie middle-aged couple that volunteered to fill in in certain cases. They were actually fun and did fun things like building houses from scratch from natural and earthly materials. They cooked with fresh vegetables and spices from the garden. They coexisted with nature. 
At that moment, I was still optimistic.

When my original foster family, a French couple, was finally back from vacation, I moved over to a horse farm they owned.
To make a long story short, everyone has seen at least one of those “American colonial times movies; my experience was looking a little very bit like that.
I had to do the shitty jobs in the burning sun six days a week. And I would get 8 euros per week to buy personal things. 

I always had a unique personality and character, but I wasn’t a bad kid.
There was no reason to put me into child labor because I didn’t have a family or home to go home too…
This was not what I signed up for, and the fact that phones, TV, and computer access weren’t allowed made it even harder for me to cope with what I was going through.

So one day I gave up. I tried to avoid work by telling them I felt sick. I felt overworked and isolated. They didn’t care about my feelings or physical state; I was still forced to work.
My social worker over there, whom I’d see 1 or 2 times a week, brought me to the doctor, who gave me painkillers. The next day, I decided to take them all. 
I preferred to “go” than to be treated like this.

My social worker was not supposed to show up that day, but shortly after I did that, she showed up, saw the strip, and called the ambulance.

That was divine intervention from above.

In the hospital, they were running all these tests. The doctor gave me some pills and sweets, and he said normally they would have had to drain my stomach based on the dose, but miraculously they didn’t have to. This was the second time in my life that I cheated “dead”.
The first time was when I was like 10 years old. Out of the blue, I became very sick and ended up in the hospital for weeks with a 43-degree fever, and they couldn’t figure out what it was. And then I miraculously was healed, and they found some weird diagnosis for it that I don’t remember…

Death and I have a peculiar connection going on. (Maybe it’s the Mars or Pluto in Scorpio in me)
I have come face-to-face with death so many times over the course of my life that I no longer fear it.  I learned that I am OVER whenever the Divine says so, and that applies to every area of my life.
It’s the royal DNA of my untamable lion ancestors, whom I believe always watch over me. Victoria has 90 lives; I don’t die; I transform into a stronger version. I’m a big cat.

Anyway, the doctor asked me why I did that in French, and my social worker would intimidate me in Dutch. She said that if I admitted to thinking about ending my life, they would put me in the psych ward, and I would never go home. So the doctor figured out what she was doing, and he made her leave the room. 

He asked me again, and I explained in my best French that I just wanted to go home without telling the backstory about my living situation. The doctor told my social worker that she should let me go home if I didn’t want to be there. 

After this incident, by then 3/4 months in, they switched me back between the first hippie couple and an older single lady who was a neighbor of one of the social workers. They still wouldn’t just let me go home. They wanted to keep me there for at least six months.
I have a feeling that had something to do with the funding and grants.

Out of the couple I spent weekends with, the woman was my only ally. She was always vouching for me. She would let me watch Dutch shows online, which helped me with my homesickness.  
I always had an angel- in human form show up in my life when I needed it the most. She was one of those God-sent people.

The older lady that I would spend the week with had a house phone line. I was tired of them keeping me in the dark about when I could go home. One day, I finally found the guts. I remembered my dad’s house phone number, and I called my dad when the lady went outside to run errands.
My dad was so happy to hear me, and he said that he was worried and that he asked many times to get in contact with me, but that they refused to give him my information.

My dad contacted the organization and demanded that they let me go, or he would come and get me himself and make them pay for it all.
I was finally released, they drove me to Paris Gare du Nord and I took the Thalys to Amsterdam, where my dad was waiting on me.

This experience taught me the following thing, society does not respect or care about children who don’t have a support system or family. That is also something my dad always told me. I learned the hard way.
A child who’s orphaned or homeless for any reason finds itself in a very vulnerable state.

That’s how communities and movements form. Deep down, nobody wants or should be completely alone.  Those that feel “orphaned” by whatever normally makes them feel secure will always find each other one way or another.

This experience helped me, but not in the way that it was supposed to or that I expected.
I started to realize why I always felt like I was being treated differently from the moment that I became supervised by the child protective system. From that point on, being who I became no longer burdened me. I understood my place in this world and what that would bring.

I promised by myself that I would NEVER EVER in my life allow anyone to give me this treatment. Not without standing up for myself.

I decided to go back to college, and I originally got into a program to get into law school. But at the same time, I pursued modeling, and that became my first choice after getting at least the so-called Plan B diploma in Social Security and Human Resources in my pocket. The study I followed planted seeds for the future.

So a little while ago, 12 years later, I got connected to an initiative that was investigating child abuse cases in the child protective service. There was no trace of me participating in that project to be found anywhere. But as you all can see, I still had the photos. I googled the company that hosted my trip to France, and they are under investigation for laundering millions of euros.

All money ain’t good money, I guess they learned that the hard way.

And every construction that’s build on a faulty foundation will sooner or later fall.

C’estMabelleVictoire™

Relevant links:
C’estMabelleVictoire Consulting Services