Brentwood's Julio 'Wikii' Moya looks for love overseas on '90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way'

A Brentwood man is among the Americans contemplating a move overseas for love on the current fifth season of TLC’s reality-TV series “90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way,” airing Mondays at 8 p.m. One of the many spinoffs of the flagship “90 Day Fiancé,” about Americans utilizing K-1 "fiance" visas to bring their international partners here, “The Other Way” flips the script to find U.S. citizens attempting to relocate abroad — often, as with the original series, without ever having met their partner in person.

Suffolk County school safety officer and part-time club DJ Julio “Wikii” Moya, however, comes to the show after first spending a week in the Netherlands with girlfriend Kirsten Schoemaker — quarantined in a hotel between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2021 due to an unexpected pandemic lockdown — and on a second trip living with her for two months in the city of Zwolle.

They had met on Instagram around October 2021, the 28-year-old Moya tells Newsday by phone from an undisclosed location, since the season is ongoing and his romance’s outcome will not air until the finale.

“I followed her [page] for quite a while before I sent her a DM [direct message],” he says. “You can kind of get to know who someone is by what they post.” That may or may not be so, given the performative nature of what we choose to show, but, he says, “The stuff she was posting with her personal life caught my attention. She wasn’t out partying.”

Indeed, the 24-year-old human-resources professional from the village of Nijveen in the Drenthe province — who keeps her Instagram private except to those she accepts to follow it — was out traveling, shooting photos of herself at locales worldwide. That touched a chord with Moya, an avid traveler himself.

“I’ve traveled to 30 countries now,” helped by the fact he has summers off, he says. “I stay where the locals live, not at fancy resorts or hotels but in a hostel or some other cheap stay. I buy meals off the street [vendors]. There’s vacationing and there’s traveling,” he says, drawing a key distinction. “She's an adventure traveler like myself,” says Moya. “That’s how we bonded.”

Born in the Dominican Republic, Moya moved to the United States at age 8 when his divorced mother, Ana Baez, remarried and came to Long Island. While we see her on-screen as she struggles to accept her son’s decision to move, Moya and TLC respected his stepfather’s decision to have “nothing to do with the show,” Moya says.

Not speaking English or having up-to-date clothing as a child made his years at Brentwood’s North Elementary School and North Middle School difficult, he says. Persevering, he earned a U.S. Dept. of Education President's Award for Educational Excellence in sixth grade, and the following year joined the National Honor Society. He participated in jazz band, choir and theater before giving them up to pursue athletics with Brentwood High School’s baseball, football, track and wrestling teams. He went on to a Suffolk Community College AAS degree in Business: Marketing.

Monday’s episode sees Schoemaker arrive in New York to meet his family, who know of his relationship but not that he plans to seek residency in the Netherlands — without a job or knowing more than a few words in Dutch. While she seems dubious about those things, Moya seems dauntless. “She’s someone I can see growing with,” he says. “She feels like home to me.”