Kintsugi Heroes
Francois de Neuville · 44 min
A Belgian commando-paratrooper who survived the 2004 Sulawesi tsunami — saving a five-year-old girl while trapped between a collapsing hotel and a deadly wave — transforms his brush with death and the loss of ten friends into a life philosophy that refuses to let suffering outlast the pain that caused it.
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Francois de Neuville was a Belgian commando-paratrooper who quit the military at 27 because he knew if he didn't leave then, he never would. He sold everything, backpacked across the world, met his Dutch wife in Indonesia, and was learning to paraglide when an earthquake struck the island of Sulawesi on 26 December 2004. While walking away from his hotel, the building collapsed behind him. He saw a five-year-old girl trapped in the rubble and climbed to reach her, then ran toward the beach as a tsunami approached. He pulled the girl into a tree and held on as the wave hit at 700 kilometres an hour. They survived forty minutes in that tree, then spent the night in a half-collapsed building before Francois carried her inland to safety. He reunited with his friend and learned the girl's mother had also survived. Ten of his friends from the paragliding competition were not as fortunate.
Francois returned to Jakarta and watched those deaths unfold on the news from his couch. Then came a second blow: the friend who had helped save the girl's mother died in a paragliding crash in India. Looking at a team photo, Francois realised he was the only survivor left alive. In that moment, something shifted. He decided he would not live as a victim anymore. Instead of staying stuck in suffering, he chose to honour the people he lost by living every day with purpose and intention. This was not about the pain disappearing. PTSD remained. Nightmares still came. But he separated pain, which is a signal, from suffering, which is a choice to stay stuck. Over time, he rebuilt his life around what actually mattered: the people he loved and the experiences they shared together.
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