They fled Ukraine and started a new life in Maine. Now they face an uncertain future.

Editor’s note: The Bangor Daily News chronicled the experience of Mariana, Zlata and Mykyta Haletska over six months.

A USA banner hangs on Mariana Haletska’s corkboard in her bedroom. A little gnome, dressed in stars and stripes, sits on a shelf. Neither are particularly precious, but Mariana values them because they are disposable. If her family moves again, she would not miss them.

Mariana fled the war in Ukraine with her two children a few days after the Russians invaded in February 2022, and they eventually made it to Orono, where they live with a sponsor family. In some ways, the war taught Mariana to let go. When bombs rained down on her city, getting out safely, with minimal trauma to her children, Mykyta and Zlata Haletska, is what mattered, not everything she left behind.

Since her arrival in Maine, Mariana and her children have been safe, far from the threat of Russian missiles. They have spent the last year searching for peace, but uncertainty hangs over them. As part of a federal program designed to bring Ukrainians to the United States, they can stay for only two years, but Mariana and her children were recently approved for an extension. In March 2027, they will need to leave the country, unless they can find a path that will keep them here permanently.

Zlata Haletska, a 6th grader at Orono Middle School, does school work in the morning to prepare for the start of school with help from her mom Mariana on Aug. 30, 2023. Her brother Mykyta is center. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN

When Russian forces launched a full-scale invasion into Ukraine on the morning of Feb. 24, 2022, Mariana sent her kids with her ex-husband to Kamianets-Podilskyi, a city in western Ukraine where Mariana grew up. Meanwhile, she hurried to the International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL, in Kyiv, where she worked as a governmental specialist.

As she waited for direction from the general, a feeling of dread nagged at Mariana, emphasized by the occasional explosion outside. That afternoon, female employees were sent home, and she reunited with her sister, Uliana, who was three weeks pregnant and trembling.

They acted quickly, leaving for Kamianets-Podilskyi before the government curfew that night. The sisters, with their mother and a friend, decided it would be safest to leave Ukraine. Like many women who fled the country, they took very little: medicine, some food and the clothes they were wearing.

They arrived in Poland, where eventually they settled in a city outside Warsaw, where the women enrolled in a skills program to work toward employment. But Mariana, who did not speak Polish, quickly realized she wasn’t where she wanted to be. She knew English from her time teaching English and German to adults at a community college, so she made the difficult decision to continue her journey with her children, leaving her mother, sister and new nephew behind.

She applied and was accepted into Uniting for Ukraine, a federal program that allows Ukrainians fleeing the war to reside in the United States for two years.

Although Ukrainians have come to the U.S. through the federal government’s refugee program or by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, Mariana is here under a status called humanitarian parole, which allows people without a visa to live and work in the U.S. temporarily. Parole does not put people on a pathway to permanent residency or a green card.

Since the Biden administration announced Uniting for Ukraine in April 2022, more than 245,000 Ukrainians have been approved to book their own travel to come to the U.S., and more than 193,000 have arrived, according to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson. Since March 2022, the country has processed more than 365,000 Ukrainians outside of the program.

In Maine, there are more than 590 Uniting for Ukraine sponsors, and at least 174 Ukrainians have arrived through the program since the start of the war, according to Catholic Charities of Maine. The count is likely higher, but the agency only tracks those that it provides services to.

Mariana connected with Edward and Nancy Deveau, an Orono couple, over a video call in December 2022, and, despite nerves on both sides, agreed to live together. They met at Boston Logan International Airport in mid-March 2023, spent a night at a hotel and drove to Maine the next day.

In their first few days together, the two families tiptoed around each other. Mykyta quietly crept into the kitchen but ran back downstairs to his room if he spotted someone. Nancy worried he was hungry or thirsty, but she didn’t want to frighten him. Mariana prepared separate meals in the kitchen because her children are picky eaters accustomed to Ukrainian dishes, and she didn’t want to disrupt the rhythm of Nancy’s routine.

Mariana Haletska dishes out homemade pelmeni, Ukrainian meat dumplings, that are a favorite of her children Zlata and Mykyta on Oct. 5, 2023. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN

But within a month, despite stumbling over words to understand each other, the kids stopped for McDonald’s with Nancy and took trips to Lowe’s with Ed, who typically came home on the weekends from his job as a nurse anesthetist in New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, Mariana bounced from one appointment to another with Nancy as her guide. By the end of June, she had a primary care doctor, a Social Security number, a driver’s license and a part-time position at the University of Maine’s Office of International Programs, which she juggled alongside courses to strengthen her English. This brought temporary relief, but the job was only for the summer, so she knew more searching was in her future.

The summer brought an ease to their lives, something many Ukrainians lost during the war. Mariana and her children stood among the trees and saw their reflections in the waters at Acadia National Park. Nancy taught Mykyta to ride a bike, while Ed and his son, Josh, took Zlata hiking at Baxter State Park. The kids camped in tents in the backyard and bit into s’mores for the first time. They jumped with the dogs into Pushaw Lake in Orono and swam under the sun. 

Mariana, too, experienced many firsts in America, such as celebrating the Fourth of July at a neighborhood cookout, where she thought deeply about what it means to live in a free country. Ukraine remains independent, but as the war drags on, nobody knows how long the country of 44 million people will hold out.

“Now I understand that each nation that experiences freedom is a happy nation,” she said. “It is a nation with a future.”

Zlata, 11, waits for the bus, not knowing that it had already come, on the first day of school on Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2023. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN

It was August 2023, and 11-year-old Zlata stood at the end of Gould Road in Orono, mostly quiet, waiting for the school bus that she had unknowingly already missed. It was her first day of middle school in America.

Behind Zlata, a layer of fog hung over Pushaw Lake. It rained the night before, so the air was heavy and sticky, causing her sand-colored baby hairs to curl into little ringlets.

Zlata wore a sage green dress, a matching hair tie and black, lace-up sandals with metallic studs, an outfit she had set out the night before. The sandals were new, an upgrade to the pair she broke while climbing a tree at Fort Knox a few days before.

Zlata’s English had improved since arriving in Maine, but she had much to learn and many new friends to make if she wanted to fit in. She had lost touch with most of her friends in Ukraine, uncertain where the war blew them.

School in Maine looks different. There are no yellow school buses in Ukraine, but she had seen them in movies. Zlata’s father, who she hadn’t seen in about seven months, used to walk her to school. This year, she wouldn’t ride the same bus as Mykyta and worried who would wake him if he drifted off to sleep. 

Earlier that morning, Zlata sat down to practice her English on a grammar worksheet, as she and Mykyta did for 10 to 15 minutes each morning. Mariana was eager for the kids to have more rigorous learning and structure in their lives, she said while standing at the kitchen counter.

Then it was time to go.

“Slava Bogy,” Zlata said under her breath as Mariana told her to get ready. Thank God.

Once Zlata’s shoes and backpack were on, her mother leaned in to embrace her daughter and kiss her cheek.

“Ya tebe lyublyu. Ya v tebe veryu. Y tebe bude vsyo horosho,” Mariana told her. I love you. I believe in you. Everything will be good with you.

“E ya tebe,” Zlata replied. And I love you.

Her voice sounded like she wasn’t quite ready to pull away.

“OK? You are brave,” Mariana added.

Back at the bus stop, Zlata waited hopelessly for her bus. By this point, nearly an hour after she left the house, there was no doubt she had missed her ride.

Mariana Haletska walks her son Mykyta, 8, to the bus stop on Aug. 30, 2023, his first day of school in America. Mykyta is in third grade at Asa Adams Elementary School in Orono. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN

She watched as her mother and brother walked hand in hand down the gravel road, and Mykyta’s bus pulled up a minute later. Zlata looked embarrassed now.

The bus driver took both kids. She had been there before Zlata arrived, running early on the first day. The schools are on the same campus, so the bus could drop Zlata off, the driver told Mariana.

The brakes screeched as the bus departed. Mykyta waved at his mother through the window, and before the moment dissipated, she pulled out her phone to snap a picture.

Minutes later, Nancy drove down the road, and Mariana jumped in, off to a job interview. Months of interviews and dwelling on how she would provide for her family had drained her, but, two weeks later, she landed a full-time job as an administrative specialist at UMaine’s physics and astronomy department.

Learning her new role had not been easy, and she still had much to untangle, she said later that month. Mariana hid her worries well, always nicely dressed with her nails painted, but, as she poured a box of noodles into a pot of soup cooking on the stove, she reflected on what she had sacrificed: letting go of the future she had pictured for her family.

“When I was forced to take just three suitcases, I thought I would start to cry,” she said about moving to Maine from Poland.

Mariana, who is confident and methodical, had imagined living in bustling Kyiv and working at INTERPOL until retirement. She envisioned the kids regularly seeing their father and continuing their schooling in the city. Zlata, she assumed, would attend one of Ukraine’s top institutions, Taras Shevchenko National University.

Mariana reminisced about her apartment in Kyiv, where she cooked meals in her red kitchen and decorated with souvenirs from her travels, such as the beloved giraffe statues she got in Zanzibar.

Here, nothing belongs to her. But there, “it was mine,” she said. “I just miss my whole life.”

“I can see us here for two years,” she later added of the family’s life in America, “but I am upset that I can’t be sure that we will live here.”

This is the worst part — not knowing, she said.

Mariana Haletska jokes around with her son Mykyta, 8, while making dinner on Sept. 30, 2023. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN

Through it all, Mariana has leaned on her faith.

She described coming to America “with closed eyes.” She didn’t know whether her family would blend with the lives of Ed and Nancy, but she “felt that someone was leading me” down the right path, she said.

“We can do a lot,” she said, “but I can’t say that I did it all by myself. I felt someone was protecting me. This was God.”

In early October 2023, Nancy walked with her dog Luner to the bus stop to pick up Mykyta, who was asleep in his seat. This is typical, she said, but a moment later he stirred, ambled off the bus, and his eyes brightened when he saw Lunar. He grabbed the dog’s leash, and they took off.

“Mykyta’s got a second wind, for sure,” Nancy said.

Back at the house, they sat down at the dinner table to play Splendor, a board game that Mykyta and Zlata enjoyed in Poland. The box was too bulky to pack, so they left it behind, but the Deveaus surprised him with the game for his birthday in April.

“I’m a big game player, and I don’t let him win,” Nancy said, smiling as Mykyta organized the cards and chips.

They strategized quietly. A few minutes later, Mykyta gasped, impressed with his own move.

“Oh, I see what you’re doing,” Nancy said to Mykyta, who giggled and tossed a Goldfish cracker into his mouth. “OK, OK, you can do that. It’s within the rules.”

This is a typical weekday for them — Nancy and Mykyta playing after school until Zlata and Mariana get home.

“He’s counting in English now, which is a change from when he got here,” Nancy said.

Mykyta had been a second grader for about a month by then, which had meant adapting to a new classroom and learning English while Ukrainian, Russian and bits of Polish were still rolling around in his mind. Mykyta continued to meet one-on-one with a teacher who helped students for whom English is not their first language.

Mykyta enjoyed being in school, where kids don’t need to speak the same language to trade Pokemon cards, but he was having a harder time adjusting than Zlata. There was a day at the start of the school year when he wanted to tell his teacher that he liked to ride his bike, but the words escaped him, so he began to cry. On a different day, Mariana had to prepare him for an active shooter drill at the school — a distinctly American student experience.

The Pledge of Allegiance, written in both English and Ukrainian, hangs on the wall in Mariana Haletska’s bedroom in Orono. Mariana and her two children are being hosted by Ed and Nancy Deveau through a program called Uniting for Ukraine, which provides Ukrainian citizens who have fled the war opportunities to come to the United States. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN

Later that afternoon, Nancy and Mykyta tossed a football around in the backyard. Nancy, who is from Texas and a Dallas Cowboys fan, noticed the kids took interest in the sport when she watched it on TV, so she bought them a football.

She threw the ball to Mykyta, who dropped it most of the time. He shouted that he was “super almost” close to grabbing it, and Nancy laughed.

Despite his foundering, he still jumped into the air, hopeful and expecting.

After many “super almosts,” he finally made the catch.

A few weeks later, Zlata competed in a cross country race in Orrington. She was likely the only student on the team whose first language was not English, the only one who had fled her country because of a war. But that part of her story didn’t matter when she was running.

Nancy had brought Mykyta to watch the invitational at Center Drive School. When Zlata ran past in her maroon jersey and shorts, her brother transformed into a megafan, screaming with joy.

As Zlata, breathless but focused, neared them again, running as fast as her long legs would carry her, Mykyta sprinted after his sister.

“Bystreye! Davai, Zlata, begi bystreye!” he yelled. Faster! Come on, Zlata, run faster!

For a moment, albeit fleeting, the siblings ran side by side, separated by a chain link fence. Zlata took off. This was a race that only she could finish.

She placed 13th among 59 girls at middle schools in the region. Zlata had placed better in other races, as high as fourth or fifth, but when her name was called, she held her ribbon up proudly and a smile stretched across her face.

Before the war, Mariana had no desire to live in the U.S. Ed and Nancy, who are in their 50s, were similarly content, busy with work, church and volunteering in the Bangor area.

But, “the war brought us together,” Nancy said.

“I would’ve never sought a Ukrainian friendship across the ocean, much less have someone in my house,” she continued, but she believes when something is meant for a person, it will come.

When a colleague of Ed’s asked whether he and Nancy would consider sponsoring a Ukrainian family, their feelings were mixed. Ed described his wife, a retired U.S. Navy nuclear power officer on an aircraft carrier, as “good with analytically thinking through things.” Nancy chimed in that Ed, a retired logistics officer in the Marine Corps, is “a big emotions guy.”

They spent a few weeks thinking and praying to “make sure we were doing what God’s will was,” Nancy said. Her initial reaction was not to host strangers in her home, but she warmed up to the idea once she learned the family was a mother with two children. Still, she had concerns about how they would manage under the same roof. She needed to meet Mariana, even if just by video call, to feel sure.

Once they spoke, Nancy realized her “responsibility to do something more,” she said. They had the finances to help another family, and with one of their two adult children out of the house, they also had the space.

Ed Deveau spends time teaching Mykyta how to play basketball at home in Orono on July 17, 2023. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN

It wouldn’t be the first time the couple opened their home. When they settled in Texas in 2012, they were foster parents and had hopes to adopt, but it never worked out. A few years ago, they again contemplated fostering or becoming respite care parents, but the timing wasn’t right.

“All of the sudden, and maybe it was the Lord working on our hearts and preparing us for this very day, it was like, ‘There’s this Ukrainian family for you,’” Ed said.

The way Ed saw it, he and his wife couldn’t help hundreds of people escaping the war, but they could lend a hand to one family. Decades from now, “it won’t be that we were the blessing,” he said. Rather, “it will be — they were a blessing to us. Honestly.”

Nancy Deveau and Mariana Haletska relax and chat by Pushaw Lake while Ed Deveau swims with Zlata and Mykyta on July 17, 2023. The Deveau’s are hosting Mariana and her children through a program called Uniting for Ukraine. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN

Even though Mariana and Nancy, whose personalities are different, seemed like an unlikely match, the arrangement works. Now they cook in the kitchen together. They help the kids with homework. They travel occasionally, visiting places such as Boston and New York City.

If their lives were reversed, Mariana acknowledged she isn’t sure she could do for someone what Nancy has done for her. “There were a lot of times in my life when I wanted to help people but didn’t know how” — Nancy knew how, she said.

Her eyes welled with tears as she spoke, and she turned to Nancy.

“These are not just words, you know. I feel it every day,” she said.

Mariana still calls her mother, sister and 1-year-old nephew, Platon, regularly, sometimes on her way to the university, where she continues to work and even attends classes to earn her master’s degree in global policy. At the end of the summer, she’ll take another big step and begin the search for a place of her own, which she hopes to find in Orono, so the kids can remain in their school district.

Mariana’s family moved back to Kamianets-Podilskyi, where air raid sirens and missiles whooshing through the sky remind them of their constant state of emergency. So far their home has remained untouched. When they talk, Mariana and her children blow kisses into her cell phone screen, the closest they can get to holding each other.

Although Mariana was granted a two-year extension of her humanitarian parole just a few days ago, the 38-year-old desires long-term stability, which this program does not provide. Under this status, she cannot leave the country. Pathways that would keep her in Maine longer are cumbersome and expensive, but she wants to stay because she believes her children have a real future here.

Mykyta and Zlata, now 12 and 9, have quiet skies in Maine. They have a routine, with breakfast at the kitchen counter and a seat on the school bus. And they have a big yard to run around in, unafraid that the ground beneath them will shake from an explosion.

March 15 marked a year that the Haletska family has spent in Orono. To celebrate, they dined with the Deveaus at a Japanese restaurant, where the children watched in awe as the cook prepared their dinner over an open flame and flung food in their faces.

So much has changed in a year, yet the worries of the past still wake her now.

It’s in the early morning, while it’s dark and everyone else is asleep, that the quiet comes roaring, bigger than her. Mariana worries her children are slowly forgetting the land from where they hail, its vast golden-yellow wheat fields under a blue sky. She worries their mother tongue is slipping away as they become more comfortable with English, that she isn’t doing enough as a parent.

And how, a world away, exhausted Ukrainian troops are still fending off the Russians as they batter the land she loves.

“The war never leaves me alone,” Mariana said.

Mariana, Mykyta and Zlata play Splendor, a board game they enjoyed in Poland, around the dining room table at home in Orono. There are people surprised by Mariana’s decision to leave Ukraine, but she had to put the safety of her children first. Some have called her brave. “And I say, if you were faced with this decision, you would do the same,” she said. “You wouldn’t even think about it.” Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN

“I feel fatigue and nothing else,” she continued. “I don’t know what to do or how to help anymore. This is the genocide of my nation.”

She would like to go back and rebuild someday, she said. Maybe her children, once they’ve earned an education here, would follow. Maybe, after years of bloodshed and uncertainty, there will be a home to return to.