The Ukrainian residents at the Maple Court in Castlepollard.

‘We really want to work,’ say Castlepollard’s new arrivals from Ukraine

“We want to work – everyone really wants to work,” are the words repeated over and over by 22-year-old Maksym Zhuk, in the confident English that has turned this former tour operator into a voluntary translator for the 56 Ukrainian nationals who recently arrived in Castlepollard.

The former Maple Court nursing home, located on the Collinstown Road, is to be the refugees’ home into the future, and the newcomers are trying to figure out their new lives in a country of which few knew anything before their arrival.

Not all the new arrivals need a translator: some speak good English, some have a smattering and some don’t speak the language at all – and are either dreading or looking forward to beginning to learn.

Somewhat incongruously, there’s an air of excitement or even jollity: they are beyond the initial shock of fleeing their homes as most are around two months out of Ukraine already and, instead, the emotions they are anxious to convey are of deep gratitude to the Irish government, to the Irish people they have met so far, to the Poles or Romanians or Moldovans who gave them precious help in the early days of their flight, to the network of other Ukrainians around Europe who hosted some of them as they took those first steps towards creating themselves a new life outside their own country.

But every so often, the air of apparent jollity slips and the homesickness becomes evident: one man wants to be photographed in his blue and yellow ‘Ukraine’ baseball cap; one woman removes her sunglasses and her eyes are wet with tears; another shows a picture on her phone of three men lying dead on the street outside her home; Maksym speaks of having had to attend the funerals of friends his own age.

The group is a mixture of family groups, couples, solo travellers. There is a small number of teenagers, but mainly the residents are adults.

The seven youngsters of that age have started school in Castlepollard, and already, there are potential employers with jobs to fill contacting the centre.