Last New Year's Day, a homeless Ukrainian woman in Co Antrim had two severely frostbitten legs amputated - now Oksana Sukhanova has a job, an apartment and is walking again, reports Susan McKay
This time last year, Oksana Sukhanova was desperately seeking work in shops and factories around the north-western towns of Ballymoney in Co Antrim and Coleraine in Co Derry. "They all said, 'No vacancies - try again after Christmas'," she recalls. But by Christmas, the 28-year-old Ukrainian woman was homeless and on the streets. On New Year's Day, 2005, she was rushed to hospital where she was found to have such severe frostbite that surgeons had to amputate both of her legs below the knees. She has come a long way since then. She's working. She's walking. She's smiling.
"I left the wheelchair at the nursing home," she says. "I prefer to walk." In her jeans and runners, it would be impossible to tell that she has prosthetic legs if you didn't know. She moves slowly but gracefully, though friends worry that she has perhaps pushed herself too far, too quickly. "I'm fine," she says, with her big, radiant smile. She understands a lot of English but is not yet a fluent speaker, and replies in Russian. Anna, a Russian woman who works for the local health and social services trust while studying to be a social worker, translates. Anna is married to a local man and is Oksana's friend now.
Oksana is from Sebastopol, on the Black Sea. She went to university and got a degree in accounting and finance. She worked in business and as a secretary. It was after her marriage broke up that she decided to leave Ukraine. "I went to an agency and they suggested Ireland. It was an expensive deal - I had to borrow the equivalent of a few years' salary from my friends and relations."
When she got here, she was told she had a job in McKeown's poultry factory in the village of Rasharkin in Co Antrim, near Ballymoney. She paid a deposit and rent for a room in a company house in Ballymoney, sharing with two other women from Ukraine and three from Latvia. Plucking turkeys wasn't exciting work, and she had the skills and qualifications for better, but she was happy enough. "We only got the minimum wage of £4.50 (€6.60) an hour, but it was okay because I worked a lot of overtime."
A few months later, one of the other migrant women workers was sacked. "She called the agency but they just told her to go away, it wasn't their problem. They told her if she didn't want to be deported she should just leave the house and disappear." Then, in September 2004, Oksana was sacked. "I'd been told by the agency that because I had a permit for a year I'd be safe. But the supervisor just told me I wasn't following the rules of hygiene and I was to leave."
SHE IS STILL very angry about what happened. "I wasn't given a chance to say anything. There was no trade union or anything like that. The other workers were shocked. They knew I was a good worker. There had been no problem before that. But they were afraid to say anything. It was really terrible. It was two months before I got holiday money they owed me."
The company said she left "by mutual agreement", that it offered to organise her return to Ukraine and that it provides support for its migrant staff, including information in their own languages. It wished her well.
Oksana moved in with some Polish men she knew who were also working in the area. No vacancies came up. She was not eligible to seek other work, but she didn't know this. Her savings were dwindling. She was getting depressed. Then, coming up to Christmas, the Poles returned to Poland. "I was left on the street. I stayed in a cheap hotel for a few nights, but then I had no more money," she says. "After that, I was just sitting outside. I slept on the streets. I didn't eat."
Her eyes fill, and then she cries hard for a few moments, her long hair falling like a curtain to cover her face. "It is better not to have had this experience," she says bleakly.
In the rush and excitement of the days before Christmas, no one seems to have noticed the lovely young woman with nowhere to go, or if they did they didn't ask any questions. It was very cold. She doesn't remember those days and nights in any detail. She didn't know she'd spent New Year's Eve on the streets.
She did know, eventually, that she was very ill. "I made my way to the house I'd lived in when I worked at the factory, and I asked them to call an ambulance," she says. One of the women who was at the house when Oksana arrived said she looked "very awful." She was brought to the Causeway Hospital in Coleraine, but was then transferred to the City Hospital in Belfast, where she was operated on within days. A surgeon said it was the worst case of frostbite he had ever seen. She was lucky to survive.
OKSANA BECAME AWARE that her plight had been described in newspapers and on television when gifts and cards began to arrive at the hospital. "I was very grateful. I even got cards from people saying I could come and live with them," she says. An Irish friend brought her books in Russian. "Classics," she says. "I read Tolstoy's War and Peace." She was in hospital for five months. "I was also given a chance to go on a scheme the Causeway Trust runs for disabled people who want to go back to work. It was good. I made candles and had some English classes."
"My parents wanted to come and get me and bring me home," she says. "I told them I wouldn't ever go back. Able-bodied people can hardly survive in Ukraine. Disabled people just die. My parents' friends have a son who fell off a roof and broke his spine. He is completely paralysed. To survive, his parents had to sell their flat and look after him," she says. "I can hope for a much higher standard of living here."
She has permission to stay in Northern Ireland for three years now, and is working again, using a microscope at MFL, a small computer parts factory in Coleraine. "They are very nice. I hope I can stay there," she says. She has to go to work by taxi at present. "I need a car. I'm not really mobile at the moment," she says. "I'm doing my test in Londonderry later this month."
The flat the Simon Community has made available to her near the River Bann in the centre of Coleraine is spacious, modern and accessible. She moved into it in June and can stay until next June. She spends a lot of time there on her own, watching soaps in English on a big television. Her friend still brings her the Russian classics. "I'm reading Michail Sholokhov at the moment," she says. Her only sibling, her younger brother, Vitaliy, has just gone home after visiting her for two weeks. "I miss my family very much," she admits. "My brother is a welder. He loved it here and would love to come back and stay but he would have to go through the agency and raise that horrendous amount of money."
Vitaliy was able to visit with the help of money from the trust fund set up for Oksana by local SDLP Assembly Member John Dallat, along with the St Vincent de Paul Society, soon after her terrible story was publicised last January. The SVDP organised a sponsored walk. Local Orangemen organised a sponsored burger-eating session. There was a benefit in a pub.
Bernadette McAliskey, who runs the South Tyrone Empowerment Project (Step) in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, says Oksana's case highlights scandalously poor provision for migrant workers across the North. The Step centre largely caters for the substantial Portuguese-speaking community in mid-Ulster. "The Northern Ireland administration needs to recruit and train qualified and bilingual people from the migrant community to give people advice on their rights, in their own language," she says. In the new year, Step will be employing two international immigration advice lawyers. "Section 75 of the Good Friday Agreement puts the onus on the State to ensure that people's rights are vindicated," says McAliskey.
DALLAT AND HIS wife Ann and their children have become friends with Oksana. "She is proud and very self-sufficient but her needs are considerable and they are long-term," Dallat says. "She needs a car and a decent place of her own in a safe area. She needs a lot of support and she needs people to be generous. Long-term she will need skills training. She's an extremely courageous young woman, but the battle she is fighting is too big for her to win on her own."
This Christmas, Oksana says she'll probably just watch television in the apartment. It will be heaven compared with last year. "I was very unfortunate, but my life is fine now," she says. "People have been very kind, helping me, and I thank them all. I think everything is very good now." Then she smiles and repeats in English: "Very good. Very good."
Oksana Sukhanova's trust fund is with Cater Allen Private Bank, sort code 165710, account number 54139077