Hey!
My situation:
I am a Ukrainian woman who wants to move to Belgium, Antwerpen, to build a new life without war. I have a fiancé and a stepson who is autistic (non verbal). And 3 cats (one of them is probably autistic too).
We adore your country and think that it is the best future for us.
Now I wanted to ask you for some advices from locals regarding our situation:
1. I work as a Game Designer remotely but my partner is eager to find the job in Belgium that is connected to helping autistic people. He has organisation here in Ukraine that called “Autistic People Friendly” and a vast expertise in this matter. Do you know which organisations we could look up?
2. I’ve heard that finding an apartment with animals is tricky here, is it true? If you know someone who could rent an apartment or the house in Antwerpen or 50km around the city, please let me know! Our budget for renting is not big – around 1500 euros, but who knows, miracles could happen 🙂
Or maybe you can recommend cervices for finding such place.
3. We would be happy to integrate in society and simply find someone local to talk to and spend evenings with, so maybe you could tip sites/communities/places, where people are gathering to play some video-, board games, like walking and chatting with strangers on poor English or even poorer Flammish 🙂
4. Tips on schools for autistic kids would be grate as well, maybe tips on red-tape bureaucratic procedures that need to be done to do that.
Will be endlessly grateful for any advices you can give that are not in the list.
And thank you all for patience and support you’ve been giving to my country and refugees from here. It means the world to all Ukrainians although we sometimes can piss you off and be annoying 🙂
Bedankt en een fijne dag verder!
P.S. if it counts as a reward, I can send you the pictures of our cats doing basically nothing. You’re welcome 🙂
by Consistent-Author-98
2 comments
Of course I can’t answer all your questions, but the animals thing, yeah.. that’s a complicated one.
A lot of owners indeed don’t like their tenants to have pets.
But they can’t legally refuse you for having an animal. (Unless the animal isn’t fit for an apartment, like a huge dog in a studio appartment, or a pony without a proper yard). Pets are considered your private life, so none of the owner’s business.
So, unless they directly ask (which they are not supposed to do in the first place) you can just not offer that information.
If they don’t like pets and they find out you have one, they will find another reason to refuse you, there will be plenty of other interested parties, so you won’t be able to prove it was because of the pets.
And directly lying about the cats isn’t a good way to start a good relationship with the home owner.
Are you on facebook? There are several gigantic fb groups for russian/ukrainian speaking women in Belgium (devochki v Belgii, mami v Belgii – both written with cyrillic letters, plus some others that are ukrainian people in belgium-specific)