L+M nurse launches campaign to help relocate Ukrainian relatives
She needs enough to get them to Massachusetts
New London — Nurses and other staff at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital have rallied behind a co-worker who launched a GoFundMe campaign seeking to defray the cost of her relatives’ relocation from war-torn Ukraine to western Massachusetts.
For Madalyn Izoita Circosta, a registered nurse who works on an L+M cardiac unit, the response has been life-affirming.
“GoFundMe signs are posted all over the hospital,” she said last week as she carried a box full of donated household items from the unit. “They’ve collected three garbage bags of kids’ clothing, toys, a stroller and a crib, gift cards to Walmart. … I’ll take anything.”
Circosta said her dad, Victor Izoita, spent $11,000 on airfares alone to fly his cousin Vika Prilutska and Vika’s three children — Karina, 12, Kamila, 10, and baby Kristina, 16 months — to the United States.
“My family’s not rich,” she added. Circosta and her family are planning to bring as many as 10 more relatives to the U.S., some of them displaced by recent shelling in Odesa, Ukraine. Two relatives are en route, awaiting a flight out of Poland.
“We need to figure out where they can go,” Circosta said. “They’re leaving Ukraine, but we don’t know if they’re coming here or to be with other relatives in Missouri.”
Vika’s husband, Alex, a police officer, had to remain in Ukraine because of a government edict requiring adult males to stay and fight the Russians who invaded Ukraine in February. Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country since then. Thousands have traveled to America.
Circosta, 24, married Geoffrey Circosta in November, having taken the job at L+M 10 months ago. Her husband works at Electric Boat and the two commute to southeastern Connecticut from Enfield, which is on the western Massachusetts border. They grew up in Agawam, Mass.
Circosta said her relatives’ “long journey” began with them huddling in a bunker in Ukraine until a supply truck could take them to Poland, where they were able to stay for four nights at no cost. They stayed in a gymnasium until Circosta’s father could get them flights out. They flew to Mexico, crossed the U.S. border into California and flew to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks.
The family of four carried all their worldly possessions in two suitcases.
Circosta is the oldest of eight children, all born in the United States. She has never been to Ukraine. Her father, his four siblings and their mother immigrated from Ukraine in the 1990s in search of a better life. Her father met his wife in the United States.
Since their arrival, Circosta’s cousins have taken to American ways, marveling at what they consider the “lap of luxury” in which Americans live, Circosta said.
To them, she said, shampoo is liquid gold.
A cellphone video captured Karina, the 12-year-old, struggling to release whipped cream from a can, then succeeding, joyfully spraying the cream into her mouth and passing the can around.
The kids can be “sobbing messes — they miss their friends,” Circosta said. “Ukrainians have a different mentality. They don’t talk about themselves and don’t like being complimented. There’s no such thing as boasting.”
There’s no asking for help either, she said.
Sometimes there’s no need to.
To contribute to Madalyn Circosta’s GoFundMe campaign, log on to https://gofundme/12f3f8ea