Journalist’s family adopts 16 children in 10 years
Petro and Nadiya Mayik, a young journalist couple living in the border town of Chop, decided to start a family-type children’s home in 1989. Nadiya started working for the district newspaper Leninske slovo (Lenin’s Word) at 15, then in Zolochiv rayon, Lviv oblast. Petro is an excellent journalist-photographer, from Sokal rayon, also in Lviv oblast.
They discovered their love for children when Nadiya, visiting an orphanage as a practicing student, heard from a boy, “You’re my mother.”
They held a family counsel and adopted five boys and girls, so that now there were ten of them in a two- room apartment: Petro, Nadiya, their own three little daughters, and five adopted boys and girls.
“First it was like a transit station,” says Petro Mayik, “for they were putting finishing touches to a cottage in Uzhhorod to accommodate our family children’s home. Anyway, we were grandiloquently promised it by the oblast authorities. But it didn’t work out.”
Somehow the Mayiks’ stand in life caused envy (sure, they adopt those kids just to have a nice home and subsidies), they even received threatening phone calls (we’ll bury all your kids!). Fortunately, nothing happened.
They have baptized two grandsons from the first five adoptees. Two others are enrolled in vocational schools.
“Previously we received subsidies,” recalls Nadiya Mayik, “so we could buy things on credit. In fact, I could afford to buy jackets for all the children. Then people got suspicious. Many times I would be stopped in the street and they would grab at the bundle of clothes, tearing off buttons, saying where are you lugging this bundle? A black marketer, aren’t you? Now we have 126 hryvnias for all of us. Horrible!”
At present, the family children’s home has six clients (a total of 16 adopted over the past decade). Two brothers from Chornobyl, Mykhailo and Serhiy Rosada, third grade student Olha from the Chynadieve orphanage, and two girls from the Perechyn boarding school. And so they live, keeping body and soul together, without government subsidies. In fact, children being signed in the local orphanages are sometimes denied even bread (sorry, too many debts).
The Mayiks say that the children they adopted have never seen sugar as such; they were served cups of tea. And neither did they know what bay leaves looked like.
The Mayiks’ independent children’s home is struggling to survive, so far a hostage of Ukraine’s permanent problems and shortcomings. And this despite Directive No. 342 of the Transcarpathian oblast state administration, reading that, in view of the Mayiks’ family-type children’s home’s tenth anniversary, funds should be allotted and the apartment repaired. Yet these voluntary teachers do not frankly expect any more or less adequate assistance from the authorities.
