Report for CNN or market pancakes? An easy choice
Rafael Carrero has found peace after swapping Europe for Taranaki, he tells Brittany Baker
For years, terrorism was on his front doorstep, but Rafael Carrero says hazards lurk around all corners of the globe.
‘‘The only country where I nearly died actually is New Zealand,’’ the well-travelled Belgian says.
‘‘It’s a very New Zealand story. I came here my very first time in September 2003.’’
Carrero was 25 and had come to visit mother Ingrid Vercammen and stepfather Marcel Naenen, who had launched Belgian-style pancake business Van Dyck Fine Foods (Marcel’s Pancakes) in Taranaki three years previously.
‘‘I went horse riding in Whangamomona and my horse slipped off the side.’’
Falling about 10 metres in mud, Carrero became trapped under the horse and nearly suffocated.
‘‘For a couple of minutes I was without oxygen at all. I swallowed my tongue. There were only two of us, the other Kiwi guy he suddenly realised that.
‘‘How he managed to get this horse off me and then also see that I was suffocating... so he took my tongue out.
‘‘At some point I just woke up and I see a lot of people around me speaking English and I just see forest and I just, I had no idea where I was.
‘‘I heard someone saying, ‘we believe this guy was dead’.’’
Members of the Mt Egmont 4WD Club were passing and pulled Carrero out of the bank using a cable before he was transported by helicopter to Taranaki Base Hospital.
‘‘Next day, I had a female reporter and a photographer coming here. I think the title was: ‘ Belgian student will ride again’. That was page three news.
‘‘That was my introduction to New Zealand. If you say Russia, you go ‘oh, all dangerous’, but ya. I nearly died here.’’
Originally from Antwerp in Belgium, Carrero has moved around a lot, having studied in Germany, Spain, Russia and Italy.
He says some of his travels were a worry for his mum.
‘‘But for me as an exchange student and later as a reporter, I don’t really... there’s danger everywhere... a possum can fall on your head.’’
When Carrero completed his studies some time in 2008, he launched down a career path where he wore a number of hats due to speaking seven different languages.
And without much knowledge of journalism, Carrero threw himself in at the deep end.
While maintaining a position with Belgium’s leading newsweekly magazine Knack, which he had begun after graduating university, he went on to specialise in EU Affairs and ICT and Digital Services, contributing to a number of titles and working in management consultancy.
‘‘If you position yourself between IT, politics, business, you don’t run out of jobs, so to say.
‘‘You make a name, this and that, and then you get into the pancake business.’’
In 2014 Carrero got involved with the family business, Marcel’s Pancakes, taking on the Taiwanese and Chinese accounts.
‘‘I had my journalism, I had my own marketing-slash-advertising thing and then I had the pancakes,’’ he says.
‘‘Now what made me come here? I need to go back two years, three years.
‘‘This is going to sound really highly political...’’
Carrero travelled to Shanghai in November 2015 for a trade event.
It was his first time in the People’s Republic of China, where the Great Firewall of China blocks most access to the internet, and it happened to be the same time that a series of terrorist attacks struck Paris.
‘‘The Lithuanian girl I was seeing at the time, she was in Paris,’’ Carrero says.
‘‘On my way from hotel to the airport, some half-drunk guy starts talking to me like, ‘hey you know the biggest attack on France? It’s another world war.’
‘‘And I couldn’t access anything – my phone wasn’t working, I didn’t know anything. So you get a big panic about all this until I arrived in Taiwan.’’
After hours in silence, Carrero learned his girlfriend at the time was unharmed.
When he returned to Belgium, Carrero received a call from journalist friends asking if he would work on an assignment for American news channel CNN, covering ‘‘a couple of police raids’’ in Brussels.
‘‘I had just come back from a business trip in China for pancakes and now I’m covering Islamic terrorists? In Brussels where I was living?
‘‘It was just in Paris and it was only a matter of time for it to come to Brussels as well.’’
Carrero felt the pressure of terrorism easing in on his home land.
‘‘When Isis, they cut off the first head of this American reporter, that was pretty scary s***,’’ he says.
‘‘When Isis suddenly started targeting journalists, that is something that I’d never seen.
‘‘I basically had a choice. Am I going to do the CNN stuff or am I going to focus on pancakes? As absurd as it may sound.’’
Carrero ultimately decided to turn down the assignment.
‘‘If you’re young and you just report or don’t think straight, you just do these kind of things,’’ he says.
‘‘But if you have family, they see it differently as you do.
‘‘Then the metro station that they blow up a couple of months later, that was my metro station.’’
Carrero is referring to the bombings at Maalbeek metro station in central Brussels in March 2016.
‘‘I thought if I get into this pancake, it’s interesting. It’s not the same as reporting, but it’s kind of funny.’’
So he hopped on a plane and came to live in New Zealand.
And he’s looking at his position as the marketing and communications manager of Eurasia for Marcel’s Pancakes as a new challenge, setting goals to push the pancakes out to the furthest corners of the world.
‘‘With pancakes, everyone likes pancakes,’’ he says, shrugging with a smirk.
‘‘With this job, it’s much longerterm thinking.
‘‘It’s also very different living in Brussels than New Plymouth.’’