Ukrainians who have fled war and moved to Ottawa are talking about their journeys, how they got to Canada quickly and what it’s like to live there.
It’s been a year since Canada welcomed Ukrainians and their families who were fleeing their country after Russia invaded in full force in February 2022.
The Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program helps Ukrainians move to Canada quickly by giving them temporary visas. The program was supposed to end on March 31, but Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said in March that it would be extended until July 15, 2023.
A long-awaited family reunio
Natasha Karpova and her husband got their fast-track visas about a month after they applied in September.
The family lived in the Poltava region of central Ukraine, but they couldn’t go to Canada right away because their three children were still waiting for their CUAET visas.
“We had to wait and wait and wait,” Karpova said.
After four months of waiting, Karpova came to Ottawa by herself in January to start working at a video production company and get ready for their new lives. Her husband and children stayed in France with a host family.
“I missed them very much,” she said. “It was a little scary to go to the new country by myself.”
Karpova said that she asked for help in a Facebook group and quickly found a place to stay with an Ottawa family. She said that they were like a second family to her, especially on the anniversary of the invasion this year, when the weight of the war back home was too much for her.
She said, “I just had a really bad day, and they cared about me and made me feel like I wasn’t alone.” “This place was like a family to me.”
The family finally got good news at the end of February. Everyone, including their husky Jacie, had the papers they needed to be together in Canada.
At the end of March, Karpova let CBC News come along with her to the Montreal airport to pick up her family.
WATCH: Natasha meets her husband and children at the airport:
“When I think about this past year, it was a terrible one. It was a great year all around “Karpova said. “I cry sometimes because I’m sad, you know? I cry sometimes because I’m so thankful.”
Last weekend, Karpova’s family moved out of a hotel in Ottawa and into a place they can finally call home.
She said, “A part of me can’t let go of my home.” “Sometimes I feel hopeful and think, OK, one day we’ll be able to go home.”
But Karpova says she recently realized something more important after being away from her husband and kids and seeing how close they became with their host families in France and Ottawa.
She asked, “Where is home?” “My family is where I call home.”
Starting from nothin
Olga Men says that she used her savings to buy a bigger apartment for her and her daughter in February of last year.
They moved in on Feb. 23, 2022, the day before the Russians came in.
“I was very happy and excited,” Men said. “We brought new furniture to this apartment, and by 10 p.m., we were done. We didn’t know what was going on when we heard those explosions at 4 in the morning.”
She said that her new land would turn into “ash and hot stones” in the coming months.
Men lived in the Donetsk area of eastern Ukraine, where heavy shelling has turned much of the land into craters and destroyed homes.
“Everything was broken up last year,” said Men. “There is no place for me to go back to,” she said.
Men, her 10-year-old daughter, and she moved to Ottawa last August after what she calls a “months-long ordeal” to get their CUAET visas. They had to go to Poland to get their fingerprints taken while working for the Red Cross.
When Men and her daughter finally got to Canada, they only had two pieces of luggage between them. They were starting from scratch.
Men felt “disturbed” for about a month whenever she heard the sirens of emergency vehicles near her downtown Ottawa home.
“Everything was making me think there was danger in the air,” she said.
When she put her daughter in school, she had to deal with new problems. Men learned that Canada had different rules about the COVID-19 vaccine than Ukraine did, and that Canada’s school curriculum was years behind Ukraine’s. Also, the new school didn’t serve hot meals like the old one did, so Men had to learn how to pack her daughter’s lunches.
Men also remembers that she sent out more than 50 resumes a day and went on dozens of online and in-person interviews a week, only to be turned down for jobs she was qualified for.
She said, “It doesn’t matter how many degrees you have or how many years you’ve worked.” “Every organization told me they couldn’t hire me because I didn’t have any work experience in Canada.”
Men is now a settlement officer for Jewish Family Services in Ottawa. She helps people like her who just moved there with a CUAET visa, showing them how to get a social insurance number and how to use food banks and walk-in clinics.
Men said that she’s thankful that she and her daughter have been physically and mentally healthy over the past year and that her host family has been there for her.
She said, “I’m very happy that my daughter can go to school and not have to hide in some shelters.”
She likes the little things about Ottawa, like the Canadian squirrels, that make her happy. Men said that a year later, she’s still getting used to things.
She said, “Sometimes I wake up and think I’m still in Ukraine.”
Before next winter, her next goals are to rent their own apartment and buy a car.
Men said that getting around the city is one of the hardest things for her and other newcomers. Like any real Ottawan, she knows how hard it is to wait for a connecting OC Transpo bus in the cold Ottawa winter.
Finding love in Canad
Last year, on March 6, Anna Fedorova and her two children left Kyiv.
“When I heard the first boom, I realized that my kids don’t need that at all, so I decided to take them out of Ukraine,” she said.
The family went to Hungary for two months and then went to Canada. Fedorova said she didn’t think she’d find love so quickly.
She said, “I felt like I needed to settle down and get a job.”
Instead, she went on a first date nine days after meeting him.
Fedorova was sitting at a table at Chop Steakhouse, which is now one of her favorite places in Ottawa. She was thinking about that first date she had with her Canadian boyfriend and said, “Today, we are in a special place.” She said that they fell in love at first sight.
“[He’s] my big love.”
Fedorova says she never thought she would live abroad, so she is happy with how things turned out.
“Even though it’s a sad reason for me to be here, I wouldn’t have met my boyfriend otherwise. I ask him, “Can you believe that we might never see each other again?”” she told him.
“Right now, this person on the other side of the world is the person who is closest to me.”
Fedorova is a member of the team at Ottawa Ukrainian Mental Health and manages Maidan Market, a place where Ukrainians can get help settling in and get services to help them do so.
She plans to apply for permanent residency and dreams of showing her partner around Ukraine one day.
Her next goal is to learn English well enough to be able to help people with their lives in English.
Fedorova says, with tears in her eyes, that when she thinks about the past year, she has a lot of different feelings.
She said, “Awful things happened in my country.” But the people she met in Canada give her a lot of hope, like her partner and her host family.
“I’d like to say thanks. Thank you, Canada, and thank you to everyone I met there “she told me. “It’s great that this war has taught us so much. We’ve seen a lot of kindness and love.”