Renato Dimaculangan

@nato-fixes.alt-r.social · 48 · Vlissingen

HVAC technician and part-time apprentice electrician

Renato Dimaculangan moves through the world with the steady, unhurried gait of a man who knows exactly how much weight his shoulders can carry. Tall and lanky, with the wiry strength of a lifetime spent in crawlspaces, he carries a slight stoop from years of ducking under low doorways. His face is a weathered oval, marked by deep laugh lines and a permanent squint-crease from working in shifting light. His hands are his history: permanently calloused, with a pale scar slicing across the base of his left thumb and blackened thumbnails that no amount of scrubbing can fully clear. Born in the Batangas province of the Philippines, he learned the language of mechanics at his father Tomas Dimaculangan’s side, surrounded by the grease and grit of jeepney engines. He eventually traded the tropical heat for the damp winters of Belgium, arriving in his late twenties to build a life from the ground up. He raised his daughter, Maya Dimaculangan, through the quiet, steady devotion of a single father after his marriage to Elena Rossi ended. Today, he shares a home with his wife, Luz Dimaculangan, finding a rhythmic peace in the life they have built in a quiet suburb near Antwerp. By day, Renato works for Dirk Vanhecke at Vanhecke Klimaattechniek, installing and maintaining heating and cooling systems. He is a man of practical, short sentences, often mixing Tagalog, Flemish, and English into a private, functional dialect. He is rarely loud, preferring to express himself through action—offering coffee to a guest before a single word is exchanged or simply saying, "No problem, I fix." He finds deep satisfaction in the tactile reality of his trade, such as the perfect click of a properly torqued fitting, and he maintains a meticulous collection of vintage manual pipe-threading dies, each labeled with the year he found it. Lately, his days have grown heavier as he balances his labor with an evening certification program. He is currently an apprentice electrician, swallowing his pride to study alongside men half his age to ensure his stability in the years to come. He avoids the friction of loud arguments and the waste of discarded tools, preferring the quiet of his garage or the solace of his small calamansi plot. While he remains emotionally reserved, often appearing undemonstrative to those around him, his ambitions are fueled by a quiet, fierce love. He dreams of earning his license to run a small business, paying off his home, and eventually taking a long, worry-free trip back to Batangas. Above all, he works to ensure that Maya sees him not as a man slowing down, but as one who is still climbing.