Belgian Armenian Karine Meliksetyan receives Flemish N-VA honorary award

The New Flemish Alliance, or N-VA, presented Karine Meliksetyan, a resident of the Belgian city of Ghent, with its annual, already eleventh, honorary award for her contribution to public life.

Meliksetyan has been living in Belgium since 1996. She came to the country as a tourist, but met her love here, got married and stayed. During her first years in Belgium, she was engaged in journalism. Over the years, honing her knowledge of the Flemish language, Karine became a translator. She worked with government agencies of the country, particularly with the migration department.
Eventually, having examined the results of statistics, she realized that in order to integrate into society, immigrant children needed more in-depth extracurricular study of Flemish.

It was not so easy to implement this idea. In 2001-2002, she appealed to local governments, but the Socialists rejected the project. This refusal did not come as a surprise to Karine, since politicians of Turkish origin constitute an influential part in the ranks of the Socialist Party, as well as the Turkish population of Ghent.

Karine did not give up and chose another way to achieve her goal. She started teaching 4 Armenian schoolchildren at home. A few months later, there were 16 of them. In 2003, Karine founded the Mariam organization, the purpose of which was to teach the Flemish language to immigrant children experiencing difficulties.

For twenty years, the organization founded by Karine Meliksetyan has worked with seven hundred teachers, helping 1,550 children to integrate into society through teaching the Flemish language.

Karine is sure that knowledge of the language forms the child’s consciousness: the more educated the child is, the better they learn their roots and are able to make new discoveries.

Karine has received an award for years of her dedicated work.

She has many projects and goals, searching for ways to implement them. Along with the management of the Mariam organization, she is engaged in another sacred work, giving lectures about Armenians and Armenia in various scientific centers in Belgium.