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Friday, March 24, 2023 5Brooklin Town Crier up at around 4 am to the sound of explosions at the naval station. "The house just was literally shaking and jumping. And at that moment I realized that it was war starting. Because I saw a dream the whole night before the war started, I had a dream that I saw this, and that was strange." The "nonsense," as she calls it, continued unabated. Her husband joined the armed forces right away. Because of her medical training, she, too wanted to join but having two young daughters, now 8 and 9 years old, stopped her. "There would be nobody to take care of them. I just had no right to do that. So he went and I stayed." Then in April she learned of a Canadian organization called CUAET, Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel measures, a federal program "to help Ukrainians and their family members come to Canada as quickly as possible and to provide them with the ability to work and study while in Canada." (https://www.canada.ca/ en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/ ukraine-measures/cuaet.html) Passports and visas Her children didn't have passports. There was no Canadian consulate in Odessa and the embassy in far away Kyiv was closed. Instead, she had to travel to neighbouring Moldova to provide biometric data like fingerprints. She eventually managed to obtain their passports but the next step was to obtain visas to get here. That meant two long and miserable days on a bus to Vienna, Austria, since there was no other way to reach it. Her girls had to stay home. "But of course that was very dangerous. But it would be a great challenge for them because the, you know, the trip was really bad. Two days in a bus with long stops and it was packed. People were sitting between the chairs so I couldn't afford taking them. But we had a shelter in the house. A basement." Within a few days, she got the visas. "I came back and we started packing. It was hard because I practiced it until the last day, I don't know, waiting for some miracle to happen. But then, just the day before, we had to leave. We packed and you know, it was also a hard thing to do because we had to pack all our life into one suitcase for each of us." They found a woman who drove them by car to Chisinau, Moldova. There, they got a flight to Bucharest, from there to Paris, and finally to Toronto, a full day of flying with their lives crammed into three suitcases. It was October 5. As for her husband, now fighting near the front lines, they'd been together once in March and then, on the day she left, he'd been given a couple of hours with them to say goodbye. Contact since then has been sporadic. Arriving in Canada They arrived at Pearson Airport at around 7 pm and took a taxi to Brooklin where Doug Summers and Jenn Rhines had set up a house for them. "These people they made something impossible for me because, you know, we were strangers for them and they accepted us here." "The moment I left Ukraine I felt that we were not free but we were not in danger and I felt a great relief. The moment we were approaching Canada and I saw the coastline, I have no idea why but I literally told my kids we are at home. I don't know why just like that was a feeling that I'm going home. I don't know why really so I was happy to come here and there was no grieving just because you know the dearest people were with me and I knew that they were safe. "I now understand that coming back to Ukraine would be convenient for me after the war because there is a house, friends, I have some social status there. I would go back to work because they wait for me at college and it would be good for me. Children's safety "But it wouldn't be good for my kids because I don't know when is going to be the next time Russia will attack us and are growing up in a country which is so destroyed and devastated right ruined with ruined economy with ruined destinies, ruined hopes, unhappy people would be cruel for my kids. I want them to be calm and happy and probably complaining about little trifles, you know. But yes, I would like to grow something here, like to plant seeds here." The girls are enrolled at Blair Ridge Public School and are as happy as can be. The older one, who in 2021 was the Ukraine's cheerleading champion, has joined the school cheerleading team. Oksana herself, as he tries to grow her aesthetics business (winchesterwellness.ca) thanks to the magnanimity of her sponsors Doug Summers and Jenn Rhines, plans to enroll in college one day to upgrade her qualifications. "If I want to do something serious here, I need to get an education here." Meanwhile, on March 29, she will be at Pearson Airport to greet close friends of hers from Odessa, a family of five, whose plane tickets she paid for, and bring them to Whitby. "You know, I never thought that our people, our nation, our men are so extremely brave and tough. I never had an idea that our nation, that Ukrainians are so strong. There's an expression. They wanted to bury us, but they didn't know we were seeds." continued from page 4