EDMONTON, Canada – For most people, the path to Ukrainian citizenship can be a slow and tedious process. But Danylo Vanovskyy, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy living in Edmonton, Canada, is not most people.
On Sept. 7 he received his citizenship in Edmonton straight from Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. It was the first act of Ukraine’s newest foreign consulate, and the only thing Danylo had to sacrifice was a day at his favorite preschool.
For a long time, Danylo’s parents Taras and Natalya — like many other Ukrainians living in Western Canada — had been anticipating the opening of Edmonton’s Ukrainian consulate, the third Ukrainian consular institution in the country. When the date was announced, the family had not initially planned to attend the opening. However, a few days before the event, they received a call from the consulate staff asking whether they would like their son to receive Ukrainian citizenship as the first act of the consulate.
“We were surprised but agreed right away. We thought we’d go there with my husband and pick up Danylo’s documents while he’s in preschool, but the consulate insisted on him being present,” Danylo’s mother Natalya Vanovska said during the interview with the Kyiv Post in October. “That’s how Danylo became the first client of the newly opened consulate.”
Dressed in a vyshyvanka and dark-blue suit with a little Canada-Ukraine pin on a lapel, Danylo excitedly shook hands with Minister Klimkin and posed for pictures. For the family, his first document is more than a formality.
Danylo, despite his young age, has already been to Ukraine twice — when he was five months old and again a year later. “We both look for an opportunity to return to Ukraine,” Danylo’s father, Taras, explained. “Natalya and I still have parents there and because we are Ukrainian citizens and it is important for us to raise our children with Ukrainian spirit in their hearts.”
Taras Vanovskyy, a Lviv native, first arrived in Canada in 1999. In Lviv, he worked with the Yunist (Youth) dance ensemble. His educational background helped him to land a job in Canada, and Vanovskyy has since worked with different Ukrainian dance groups, including Shumka Ukrainian Dancers and Viter (Wind) in Alberta as the groups’ manager.
“Every month I drove about 10,000 kilometers touring the province with the dance ensembles. I got used to snow, deer, and moose. In Alberta only, there are probably more Ukrainian dance groups than there are in Ukraine,” he explained.
Vanovskyy worked on the Ukrainian dance scene for almost ten years until he decided to change fields completely and become a realtor. He still tries to teach his son dancing though. “So far, it hasn’t been very successful,” Vanovskyy said, laughing.
Vanovskyy often traveled to Ukraine and that’s where he met his future wife Natalya, who at that time worked as a journalist for Ternopil-based newspaper Vilne Zhyttya (Free Life). They started communicating and had a long-distance relationship for a while. “…Until one day when he proposed to me via Skype,” Natalya recalls.
In 2009, she first came to Canada — with high hopes and no English. She picked up the language quickly, attending classes for immigrants in one of the city’s colleges. Later, Natalya Vanovska got a chance to work at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, an open-air museum telling the story of Ukrainian settlement in east central Alberta from 1892 to 1930. “That’s where my accent came in handy,” she adds. “It was a perfect experience and a chance to get closer to Ukraine.”
However, Vanovska always wanted to work in a library and be “closer to the books.” Now she works at the Heritage Valley Branch of the Edmonton Public Library. The biggest difference between a Canadian and Ukrainian library, she says, is the feeling that it’s “alive.”
“They have enough resources to get new books published not only within a country, but those from abroad. They can afford ordering Ukrainian books and I was absolutely amazed by the fact that here in Canada I can get access to the new books published in Ukraine — be it children’s or non-fiction literature. People read a lot here,” Vanovska says. “And everything is for free, including the membership.”
At home, Danylo speaks Ukrainian only and Vanovska hopes that, in the future, their son will attend Ukrainian school — either in Canada or back in their homeland.
