FOLHA DE S. PAULO (Brazil)
SÃO VICENTE – With his twin five-year-old sons in tow, South Korean university professor Kim Haeng-Chang has been to Thailand, India, Turkey, Croatia, Germany and Senegal. Part of the months-long journey is done on a bike that tows a small wooden wagon adorned with a sign that reads: “Your help makes our world tour.”
On October 8, Kim and his boys arrived in Brazil for what would turn out to be the most eventful leg of their trip. After the adventurous father-and-sons story was shown on Brazilian TV, three men, one of them holding a gun, robbed them while they camped on a beach. The assailants made off with $600 and all the family’s documents—passports included.
“I had been robbed before in other trips just by myself, in Nigeria, for example. But this is the first time my passport was taken,”, says Kim, 48.
After being robbed, he was helped by the locals and went to the police station. There he met a flight instructor named Sérgio de Carvalho, 39, who had also been recently robbed. “I realized I had to help him” says Carvalho, who found a place for the Kims at a friends’s home.
Now the whole neighborhood is curious to meet Kim and his sons, who will have to wait at least two weeks until new passports are issued. One of the first questions is always about Kim’s wife (and the boys’ mother). She didn’t join the voyage, staying back in South Korea with the couple’s baby daughter.
