Ukrainian refugees find help, hope as they settle in Bucks County
As she sat at the dining room table, eight months pregnant with her third child, Christina Yaremchuk pondered what she was going to cook for dinner. It was a cloudy Monday afternoon and she made a profound observation.
Whether here in America or in her native Ukraine, “Monday is always Monday.”
Her two sons had homework to do, her husband was heading out to work and she had a meal to prepare.
Yaremchuk and her family are refugees, who arrived in Feasterville three months ago, after spending five months in Poland, fleeing the Russian bombardment of their homeland. They are among the thousands coming to Bucks County as the war continues in their beloved homeland. Some are here to stay, and others hope to return when it is safe.
Yaremchuk considers her family lucky that her parents moved here five years ago and could welcome them and her twin sister with her husband and daughter to their townhome. The house is now crowded with the three families. But with the new baby due next month, there’s hope here for the future, and a new life in a new country, at least until the war ends.
Christina and her husband Pavlo expected to have a third son, as boys run in his family, so it was a pleasant to learn that the baby would be a girl.
“This is a surprise. Maybe the war will be over. It will be the best day in my life,” she said. Their sons, Vladyslav, 12, and Markiian, 9, beamed at the thought of having a baby sister.
They can’t speak much English yet, but the boys are adjusting to going to an American school, in a real yellow school bus. They have American haircuts now and Vlad smiles a wide, braces-on-teeth grin as he says that he loves “pizza.”
“They go to school on the school bus like in the movies. They like it very much. I really appreciate it very much,” she said.
Uniting for Ukraine
The Yaremchuks are one of thousands of Ukrainian families who have settled here since the war started.
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has started a program called Uniting for Ukraine (U4U) that allows individuals and families who have sponsors here to come for up to two years as parolees. They then can apply for regular immigration status if they want to stay.
Katey Marseglia works in the county’s Human Services Department and is helping the refugees.
In the past few weeks, she said 1,900 Ukrainians have applied for U4U visas to come specifically to Bucks County. The U4U program is working with several local social service agencies to resettle them.
The Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia is leading the effort, coordinating with Bethany Christian Services, Catholic Social Services and Hias, which was founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society but works with all people. Immigrant Rights Action, an agency to help refugees and asylum seekers based in Doylestown, also is helping as well as groups that teach English as a second language. They are working with several Bucks County school districts, which have received an influx of students, and the county Human Services Department as well as associated non-profits which are helping with housing and employment.
Marseglia said the Human Services department is seeing about three families a week and the number is “just going to keep growing,” she said as more people come to the U.S. and once they get here and established, can sponsor other family members.
She said the county is modeling its efforts “after what Philly did with the Afghan refugees.”
“It’s difficult. A lot of them come over with nothing,” Marseglia said.
And some are traumatized from what they witnessed or experienced. She recalled one elderly man who came to live with his daughter after his wife died because she couldn’t get the supplemental oxygen she needed once the war started. Another family had a teenager so traumatized that she couldn’t speak.
“It’s really heartbreaking,” Marseglia said. “We try to make them (feel) welcomed and safe.”
The refugees want to get working so they gain independence from living with relatives and that requires documentation to work in the United States, including a Social Security card and employment authorization. It costs about $410 for these documents. And they need SNAP or supplemental nutrition assistance funds as well as Medicaid to provide for medical needs.
Vita Education Services is working with the United Way of Bucks County to provide English as a Second Language classes to about 40 adults at the Regeneration Church in Fairless Hills, said Mercedes Anderson, Vita executive director, who noted that other educational agencies are offering similar classes in other counties.
Social service personnel know that sooner or later the sponsors will become fatigued with having refugees, even if they are relatives, staying in their homes, so the agency is trying to prepare for how it will help them move into other housing when they become established. With the cost of apartment rentals high in Bucks County, there are no easy solutions.
Bucks County attractive to immigrants
“Our region is one of the top regions in the country,” for resettlement, said Danielle Dembrosky Bossert of the Bethany agency.
The Nationalities Service Center gets about 10 to 15 phone calls a day from Ukrainians who need help, along with refugees and asylym seekers from other countries. And all types of help are needed.
Some volunteers “can provide hot meals but they can’t help with paperwork,” because of the language barrier. “We help people apply for benefit cards, how to adjust to a new life, manage stress, create budgets,” said Romana Gordynsky of the NSC, ticking off all the ways that the NSC and the other agencies are working with the refugees and with the counties in Southeastern Pennsylvania to coordinate and not duplicate services.
Kathleen Bevenour, assistant director of Catholic Social Services, said CSS is also getting more calls from families. So far, it has settled about 20 families in Northeast Philadelphia and Bucks County. “Sometimes families will show up at our office in Levittown.”
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“Ukrainian families in need of help can call the U4U hotline at 215-608-1966. Based upon their geographic location, they will be directed to an agency to help," Bevenour said.
CSS is also helping to form Welcome Circles. Welcome Circles are groups of 5 or more people who are willing to support a family for two years while they acclimate to their new community.
“Housing is a big issue,” she said. ”To find rents that are affordable is tricky.” And in the suburbs, people usually need to know how to drive, and getting a driver’s license is another obstacle, especially for those who cannot speak English well.
The agencies and advocates are passionate about their work with refugees as they know how far they have come to be safe.
While the Yaremchuks are from Western Ukraine, a woman named Oksana and her husband and three sons, including a 14-year old and twins who are 11, are from a town near Kherson in the South where some of the heaviest fighting of the war with Russia has taken place. They did not want to give their full names for privacy reasons.
Like the Yaremchuks, they were allowed to leave as a family because they had or were expecting a third child.
“They heard the first bomb. They got ready in three hours. They moved as soon as possible,” said Anna Kharaeva, a resettlement case manager with Bethany who served as a translator for the mother. The family drove and got to safety in Romania and then applied for U4U status with her sister as a sponsor here.
“I felt happiness because we were safe,” the mother said, but she knows that a neighbor’s house in her home city was destroyed and she is worried about her father who is still in Ukraine. Parts of the region have been “deoccupied.”
“I just want to say that I’m very grateful to your country that my family is safe. We don’t know how long this war will last and our city is bombed every day. We don’t know if our apartment will be there.”
But for now their children are thriving in schools in Bucks County and she proudly notes that her oldest son doesn’t need to be in an English as a second language class because he is so fluent. “His level is high. Computer games helped him,” she said. “They like your schools very much.”
Heidi Roux, executive director of Immigrants Right Action, said several people in Central Bucks are helping her agency help the refugees and those still in Ukraine, as well as asylum seekers from Central and South America. Maryana Ferguson of Hatboro and her American husband Steve are working on efforts to get supplies to her contacts in her native Ukraine.
Immigrants bring skills, desire to work
Iryna Tepla who has cousins who recently arrived in the United States said she also has a relative serving in the Ukrainian Army. "He would like to thank every American for the supplies they are sending to the Ukrainians. They are so grateful," she said.
And she said that Ukrainians who come here and want to stay in the United States will help this country.
“They are hard workers,” she said. “America is lucky to be getting these refugees. They’re well educated.”
But Bevenour said that many of the families who just arrived want to return to their homeland when the war is over. That includes the Yaremchuks who said they left their house, two cars and their forklift business, which Pavlo is trying to run from here using Zoom.
“If the war will be at the end, we’ll go back,” Christina said. But for now, her husband doesn’t even want her to watch the news because it is so sad. They both are concerned about their relatives and friends still there.
Christina said they left mostly for the safety of their children. Ukraine was just getting through the COVID crisis when the war started.
“Once again, starting a new page,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. This is life. You don’t know what this will be,” she said, adding they were “so happy” to learn she was pregnant and having a baby girl.
“If you are healthy and have security, it’s the most important thing in the world,” she said.
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This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: More Ukrainian refugees are coming to Bucks County, finding aid, support
