Maria Rosado | Valladolid (EFE).- The Ukrainian dressmaker Anna Selevaniuk had just expanded her house with a garden in Nikolaiev, where she lived with her husband and their two girls, when the war broke out in Ukraine and she had to leave her home with little more than what she was wearing and Now, almost a year later, her Spanish avatar “Aña”, as her name affectionately sounds in Spanish, runs a sewing atelier in Valladolid where she sews everything, including her life.
From “Aña, atelier de couture”, also in a nod to her new home in Spain, the 37-year-old Ukrainian dressmaker Anna Selevaniuk, with a degree in her country, where she designed toys and leotards for rhythmic gymnastics, has embarked on her She had her own business in Valladolid, with the financial support of her parents, because she had no other choice to support her two daughters and because “to sew” she did not need to speak.
“My work speaks Spanish very well”
“My work speaks Spanish very well, when you work well you don’t need languages,” he conveys in an interview to EFE with a Spanish in which he makes himself perfectly understood, after less than a year in Spain.
It was in March 2022, when after two weeks stuck in a basement listening to the bombs fall, they took the places offered by a friend who was going to go to another city and Anna and her two daughters undertook the journey that lasted six days, with stopping in a border city with Poland, it would take them to Valladolid.
However, her husband would not take that path until August.
After the death of his father, his mother, an English teacher, married a Bulgarian citizen who had an acquaintance in Valladolid, a woman who provided them with a house and help in the first months and when starting the workshop sewing, since she has come across Spanish paperwork that has made it difficult for her to access aid to start the business.
Fluency with the language
“Aña” remembers those months alone, with her two little girls, aged six and three, until her husband arrived in August, although since June she had already taken over the transfer of the premises where she opened the sewing workshop in Valladolid, centered in arrangements above all. The first two weeks she even had to use an interpreter to make herself understood among the clients.
Three hours a day of Spanish, from the Red Cross, the University and the church, reinforced with more work at home, have led him to a certain fluency with the language and what he does not understand he looks up on the internet and resolves.
Her husband has not had the same fortune, he was a manager in a plumbing company in Ukraine and he cannot find a job here, “it is very difficult.”
“You don’t have another life, you need to do what you want now”
“When everything is lost, life is very short. You don’t have another life, you need to do what you want now, not tomorrow, ”transfers the Spanish Aña when questioned about her courage.
Unlike other Ukrainian families in Valladolid, she does not consider returning to her country for at least five years and has even dreamed of designing her own wedding dresses and gymnastics leotards. Now what she does are commissions, already designed, for a club in Valladolid.
In the new life of Anna Selevaniuk, her two daughters go to the Pablo Picasso school in Valladolid and already read books in Spanish. Of course, her friends are from Ukraine and they don’t like school food, it’s very different.
She is satisfied with the variety of fruit, vegetables or fish that she can buy, and although she does not have Spanish friends, they really like the people who come into her atelier. “Very good people, I like them a lot,” she insists.
This is the case of Adela, a client who comes in for some repairs on a blouse. It sews well, yes, she explains to EFE.
War, a topic they prefer not to think about
When the first year of war in their country is about to come to an end, the news continues to reach them from those they left behind in their land, but it is a subject they prefer not to think about in their day-to-day lives or in conversations with their daughters. .
What comes to them is that “the issue is calmer and that half of the people in the cities have left,” he explains.
They don’t have television in their new life in Valladolid, but their oldest daughter, six and a half years old, who reads books in Spanish and has her Ukrainian friends, misses her other life.
His daughter asks him why they live in Valladolid and when they return
Why do we live here, why don’t we go back to Ukraine? her daughter asks. They know about the war and although they talk about it they prefer not to think about it.
And Aña is especially moved when she remembers the other Anna, the one who left her recently enlarged house with a garden, the one who has a brother who lives in Odessa with his wife, and who cannot leave there either.
She had just expanded her house and was preparing a life, the one that Aña now dares to dream of from her atelier in Valladolid.EFE
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