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By Alan Quartly, BBC correspondent in Cherniyiv, Ukraine
BBC NEWS, UK, Monday, May 10, 2004
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Roman Kopitovich and family in Soviet times.
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CHERNIYIV, Ukraine - Svetlana met Roman Kopitovich at a party
when her brother was leaving home to join the army. They married.
He worked as an engineer and she got a job in the district post office.
Western Ukraine in the late 1970s and early 1980s seemed as good a
place as any in the USSR to bring up a family. Roman and Svetlana
had two daughters - first Natalia, then Zoryana.
Then history intervened.
With the social and economic upheaval brought by the end of the
Soviet Union, living standards plummeted in Ukraine.
Roman found himself earning the equivalent of $50 a month with two
teenage daughters heading for higher education - an expensive
privilege in the post-communist era.
Sitting in her small house in the village of Cherniyiv, surrounded
by traditional Ukrainian embroidery, Svetlana said: "The girls had
to study. Therefore we decided that one of us had to go abroad. And
so it turned out that my husband went."
ILLEGAL TRAVEL
That was in September 2002. Roman made the journey thousands of
eastern Europeans have made - travelling illegally through western
Europe until he found himself in Britain.
For the family back in Ukraine, life got tough. But Roman was soon
sending back nearly $1,000 a month for his daughters' studies.
Then earlier this year disaster struck.
Roman, 47, was found dead in the basement of the Cafe Royal in
London where he had been working as a kitchen porter.
An inquest in the British capital last week recorded a verdict of
accidental death, saying the Ukrainian had slipped after taking a
shower, adding he had just finished two consecutive 12-hour shifts.
There were claims that Roman - unknown to his employers - had
actually been living in the basement to save money.
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"Everybody who goes to work abroad has an aim --
to buy something, repair something, maybe buy a flat." Svetlana
Kopitovich
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FAMILY SNAPSHOTS
"It was a tragedy for the girls," confided Svetlana at home in
Ukraine. "He was a caring father to the children. They were the most
important thing to him. He went abroad to work to give them an
education, to give them happiness in future life."
Natalia, 20, has one year to go to finish her economics degree at a
college in the town of Ivano-Frankivsk. Her sister Zoryana, 18, is
in the second year of a six-year course at medical school.
When we went to see the family they were wondering where they would
find the money to bring Roman's body back to Ukraine - although this
has since happened.
All they had to remember their father were some family snapshots and
a faxed copy of a London coroner's death certificate saying Roman
died due to a "fractured cervical spine" and describing the
qualified engineer as a "cleaner".
The two girls pressed on with their studies. Trying to hold back the
tears, Zoryana said: "He didn't tell us much about what he was
doing. He just said you study and I'll pay for it."
Natalia and Zoryana spoke to their father on the phone nearly every
week. He always sounded cheerful.
"Of course if we had known what could happen, we wouldn't have
wanted him to go," said Natalia. "But if he hadn't been working in
the kitchen then we wouldn't have got our education."
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Mother and daughters wonder
how they will cope.
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LARGER PHENOMENON
But now the family is left without a father and without the means to
finance the daughters' studies. Svetlana does not know how they will
cope.
She realises that what her family has gone through is part of a much
larger phenomenon.
Western Ukraine with its huge collective farms and specialist
factories in Soviet times now has little to offer to the working-age
population.
"People go abroad because they can't find highly paid work in their
home countries," said Svetlana. "The money they get abroad might not
be much, but in their home countries it goes a long way. It's not
just Britain people go to. There's Italy, Spain, Portugal - wherever
people can get to."
The story of the life and death of Roman Kopitovich sent shockwaves
through the dilapidated villages of western Ukraine.
Official statistics in the country say millions of Ukrainians travel
abroad to work every year. But Roman is unlikely to the last of his
countrymen to take a similar chance while the motivation to do so
remains.
"Everybody who goes to work abroad has an aim - he needs to buy
something, repair something, maybe to buy a flat. Far be it from me
to offer advice on whether someone should go - everybody has to act
according to their own circumstances," said Svetlana.
"How long can you be unemployed? You have to live."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3701867.stm
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