The family visited Asia every year; they were always able to secure cheap fares because Budy now worked as a supervisor at Malaysia Airlines in Amsterdam. But this year they had had to postpone the flight they had planned for a day earlier because a typhoon was lashing the Philippines. They decided to wait it out and by chance they managed to nab business class seats on MH17 the next day.
Back in the Philippines, Irene was regarded as the light and laughter of her clan. The fifth of six children, she had always been outgoing and music-loving. At an early age she had decided that she wanted to see the world that existed beyond her sleepy rural village, so after finishing high school she spread her wings and took off. But during her long stays abroad, home tugged at her heart and Irene often flew back to ‘Heaven’, the name of her family’s neighbourhood in the town of Pagbilao.
Irene had a great voice and at reunions she belted out her favourite Norah Jones and Diana Ross songs. This year, the couple and their two children were once more flying to Pagbilao, but now their son, Darryl, was bringing his DJ equipment along.
Irene and Budy had passed their musical genes on to their two children. Although Darryl Dwight Gunawan studied medicine, he was passionate about developing a career as a disc jockey and was already known as an up-and-coming artist; having won a Dutch DJ contest at the age of fifteen, Darryl now taught others slightly younger than himself the tricks of the trade. He had founded a company called Dwight Media, which produced the music of young emerging talent.
His little sister, Sherryl, a fourteen-year-old high school student, had one main passion, dancing, especially street dance. She was part of the hip-hop team Dance Tech at her dance school in Amstelveen. The team was good, very good—so much so that they had been chosen to compete in the world championships for street dance, to be held in Glasgow later in the year. The three-day event would host dancers from more than thirty countries, including the US, South Africa, China and Australia. For the students of Dance Tech it would mean competing at an elite level. Acts from The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent were due to appear, and Sherryl had been working hard at her moves, as well as working hard at the local supermarket to raise the money for the flight to Glasgow.
Back in economy class, two families had settled in their seats looking forward to the vacation they would spend together. They lived in the same street and the husbands played in the same amateur football team, their kids went to the same school, and now the Trugg family and the Wels family were heading for Bali together. Needless to say, the two families were close friends. Living across the road from each other in the town of Rosmalen in the south of the Netherlands, their homes faced one another across a grass square with swings and park benches.
Leon and Conny Wels, both thirty-nine, and Yvonne and Remco Trugg, both forty, had to contain the excitement of their children when they told them of the plans to visit Bali earlier that year. After Leon and Remco’s football team won the season’s competition, the men thought a combined trip would be a nice way of rewarding themselves and their families. Young Sem Wels was close mates with the Trugg girls, Tess and Liv. The kids had been over the moon at the prospect of spending time on a tropical island.
Remco had been a member of the OJC Rosmalen football club since he was eight years old, his father being the chairman there. Most of the men in the team had grown up in the same neighbourhood and known each other for years. After Leon came to live in the same street, he soon became friends with his new neighbour across the road. They shared a common profession, both of them working in finance: Remco Trugg ran his own financial service company and Leon worked as a personal banker. Remco soon introduced the newcomer to the local football club and Leon blended naturally with the tight-knit group of friends.
OJC Rosmalen’s seventh team was a very close group: they held parties and birthdays together, and as many as five of the team’s families would sometimes spend their summer holidays together. Everyone on the team was around forty years old, and they were all married and had young children. Whenever the team played, the wives and their children would come along to cheer them on.
Under her maiden name Stuiver, Conny had once been a well-known ice skater. In the early nineties she was one of the top Dutch figure-skaters and in 1992 she came second in solo skating at the Dutch championships. After her career as a skater ended, she became a choreographer and trainer for a Dutch figure-skating club. With her natural knack for coaching, some of her pupils went on to achieve medals and national titles. Although she still coached, she now also worked for an accountancy firm.
Their son Sem’s passion had originally been gymnastics, until physical problems arose from the intensive training. To his dismay he was forced to stop, but he soon found another vocation. The ten-year-old joined an inline skate club and remarkably, after just six months of training, he came first in a contest. His mother’s skating genes had undoubtedly contributed to his success.
Forty-five-year-old Hans van den Hende was a survivor. Although he never made a big deal of it, his colleagues at work knew it was a significant achievement that just before he left for Europe, he had been told that he was clean, no more cancer cells. He had battled leukaemia and won.
Moving to Australia seven years ago with his wife and three very small children, Hans and his family had fallen in love with the country. It had become their home. Hans was Dutch and had grown up in Veendam in the Netherlands. After high school he went to the far north city of Groningen to study chemistry, and from there he went to Brighton in England to get his PhD. In Brighton he met his Malaysian wife, Shaliza Dewa, who was also studying for her PhD. They had sealed their love with marriage in December 1995; in fact, a double marriage—one in Malaysia, in traditional Malay dress, and one in the Netherlands. For the next twelve years the couple had lived in Kuala Lumpur, where their three children were born.
The family had then moved to Australia, where Hans was offered a job at Securency, the banknote printing development company owned by the Reserve Bank. He’d been diagnosed with bone-marrow cancer very soon after starting the job and for many months he was absent from work while he underwent therapy. However, he ultimately returned to work and had now been in remission for five years, the statistical milestone which usually signifies a future free from the disease.
Hans was known for his very dry Dutch wit and his unassuming intelligence. With a PhD in chemistry, his colleagues knew he was probably the smartest guy in the room, but he wasn’t one to take himself too seriously. This was underlined when he sometimes wore his clogs to work, just to get a rise from his colleagues.
The Van den Hende family loved Australian life and it was their intention to stay there. They lived in a neat weatherboard house in western Melbourne on a relatively new estate called Eynesbury. The three children attended Bacchus Marsh Grammar School, a twenty-minute bus ride away. Their eldest son, Piers, played football at Melton Phoenix Football Club and had had a hit of golf with a junior development squad at Eynesbury. Their middle son, Marnix, was a promising swimmer, a talented butterflyer who had made the Victorian state team. Hans often spent his pre-dawn hours driving his son to the pool in Melton and back home again before taking the long arc of Melbourne’s Western Ring Road into work.
Their youngest, Margaux, was the one who lit up the room for the couple. She loved to dance and had joined a dancing school, and she often practised her routines in the middle of the kitchen for them to see. The children had forged deep bonds in the community during the short time they had lived there, and Hans and Shaliza often enjoyed sharing a glass of Australian wine, a cold beer or a cuppa with their neighbours.