A Ukrainian-Canadian sent to pick up her 88-year-old mother, forced to cross a war-ravaged country by train, is stuck in Hungary because of an administrative headache.
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The octogenarian left his hometown Zaporizhia by train for the border with Hungary, crossing a bomb-stricken Ukraine as the train had to stop and turn off the lights at night to escape Russian planes.
“It was quite a challenge to get to the border. My mother sat for 30 hours. The train crossed nearly 1,000 km to reach the city of Lviv,” Olena Polonska told QUB radio on Wednesday.
- Listen to Olena Polonska on QUB radio:
The old lady accompanied by a child took a taxi which took six hours to reach a small border town, where they were taken care of by charitable souls, before traveling another 20 km before reaching a border bridge.
“We went from Budapest to welcome them to the border”, certainly less busy than the border with Poland, continued the guest of Mario Dumont, admitting that the nightmare was not over yet.
Once in Budapest, they are confronted with a real bureaucratic wall at the Canadian Embassy which has closed the door in their face. “Even if I hold a Canadian passport, we were unable to enter,” she denounced.
The octogenarian thus remained stuck in Hungary without a travel document, lamented Mme Polonska who deplored the aggressiveness of Canadian embassy agents towards vulnerable and often destitute people.
“There are people who just speak Ukrainian, who don’t have any money. If they don’t have government help, it’s impossible for them to get to Canada,” she said, adding that many vulnerable people are in the same situation as her mother.
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