Ladies coffee night with Joke Quintens

Damla, member organisation of Fedactio, organised a Ladies Coffee Night on the 19th December. Joke Quintens, currently assistant head of SP.A and creative coach, was invited to the event. Our general coordinator Duriye Demircan and the coordinator of Fedactio Genk Fadimana Gokuzum welcomed the guest to the event that started at 7pm.

Fethiye Akyazi, president of Damla, first gave some information about the association. Then, Quintens shared her perspectives on a life that is “well-achieved” and her positive and negative experiences as a working mother.

Originally from Heusden Zolder, Quintens has two siblings. Her mother taught marketing and her dad was working as a builder. They divorced when she was 11, an event that transformed her mother into an independent and strong woman.

Quintens decided to study History, her favorite subject, in Leuven. She did a lot of voluntary work when she was younger and wrote her thesis on Turkish immigration. She learned many things while she interviewed 50 Turkish women for her thesis. She mentioned that, although she likes history, the future always interested her more than the past.

She worked in different places before teaching history in schools. Then, she taught the Dutch language to newcomers in Brussels. She also worked at Sp.a Nationaal as a career adviser. She gave some courses to politicians, like creative politics, while staying backstage in the world of politics.

Quintens decided to live in Genk with her daughter. She shared with us the three slogans that she installed in her own life:

-Be positive
-Be constructive
-“While you carry on doing what you’re doing, you’ll carry on collecting what you’re collecting” A. Einstein

The audience was very happy with the talk and very much liked Quintens’s dynamic and interesting speech.