Relief in the Rockies: Jasper campaign opens homes, businesses to Ukrainian refugees
CBC
When Margarita Oganova awoke to the roar of military planes overhead, she went to her children's bedrooms to tell them the war had started.
Confused as he woke up, her 15-year-old son Arkady thought it was a cruel joke.
"We were thinking she was just trying to wake us because of school but it was real," Arkady said, remembering how he and his sister, Karina, 13, made their beds and ate breakfast in stunned silence on that Feb. 24 morning.
"It was at that time the sirens were starting, it was really scary for us," he said. "We didn't know what to do."
It would be the last time he slept in his own bed. Soon he would be packing a small suitcase as the first Russian airstrikes landed on Ukraine.
The family lived in Kremenchuk, a city about five kilometres from an oil refinery that was later destroyed.
Oganova and her children moved across town that morning to her sister Anna Kushko's house. In the days before they eventually fled to Poland on March 7, the entire family spent hours at a time underground, in basement rooms fortified with sandbags.
"We, as a people, were very scared," Oganova said. "Many times in Kremenchuk, there were sirens."
The sisters are now waiting out the war in Jasper, Alta.
They are among the first of more than 50 Ukrainians expected to arrive in the mountain town as local families open their homes and businesses to refugees.
In Ukraine, Oganova worked as a fitness trainer; Kushko was a sales manager.
The sisters now work together at the Jasper Inn and wash dishes at a local restaurant in the evenings.
The three children remain in Slave Lake, Alta., with relatives so that the women can work longer hours and send money back to the family they left behind, including Anna's husband.
The sisters are thankful for the work but long for home.