Natalia Nuzhyna watches as her young son draws with colourful chalk on the sidewalk in front of a home in Toronto’s west end where they now live.
It is a world away from the family’s real home, in Odesa, Ukraine.
“I miss my life because it was simple. I had a job, I had daycare, I had school. I had everything in my house like I want,” she said.
Nuzhyna has been in Canada for three weeks.
“I left Odesa at the third day of the war with my two kids, ten and three years old. We crossed the border with Moldova. It takes eight hours and then we go to Bucharest, Romania,” she recalled.
It’s a journey Nuzhyna was forced to make without her husband, who stayed behind to fight.
Her father, who is 81 years old, also remained in Odesa.
“I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. My children were very stressed,” she said, remembering the onset of the war.
Nuzhyna is now adjusting to life in Toronto and said she is grateful for the support from family and community.
“I didn’t expect that support … I am very thankful,” she said.
“When it looked like the visa was going to come through and we had a rough date of when they were coming, we realized, ‘OK, now we have to set up the infrastructure here,'” explained Jennifer Phelan, Nuzhyna’s cousin.
“(We) started reaching out to neighbors and family to get the basic needs met first, like where they’re going to live, to get some money together to keep them going,” she added.
Phelan became connected online with a homeowner who offered up a basement apartment for free for as long as Nuzhyna needs it.
“From that post, where I was looking for subsidized housing, so many other people who didn’t have a place to offer said, ‘OK, but we have lots of clothes for the little kids, or toys, or art supplies,'” she recalled. “A woman who is a retired ESL teacher who lives in Roncesvalles pretty close is now coming every Monday to do private lessons in English.”
Nuzhyna left Ukraine with two bags and a suitcase, filled with photographs and her tools for crafting leather goods.
“These memories I want to keep .. because it’s very special,” she said.
Nuzhyna’s daughter is enrolled in fourth grade in a Toronto school, while her son is beginning daycare.
“Sometimes he asks, ‘so father is at home and we are here? But where are we?’ He doesn’t understand,” she said.
While she does not regret her decision to leave, Nuzhyna said she wonders when or if she will be able to return to Ukraine.
“Now we are safe. We are in a good place,” she said, adding “we must live for every day.“
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