How uprooted Ukrainians are finding a sense of belonging on a Langley farm

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Word travels the way it does in a scattered community — Facebook groups, Telegram chats, a flyer at school.

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Yulia Osetska, who arrived in late 2023, heard about a week-long children’s summer camp at the farm and signed up her six-year-old daughter Kristina, who spent the days feeding animals and swimming.

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“My child was so happy. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Osetska said. “She’s very hyperactive, it’s hard for her to focus. But there, she was completely present.”

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Yulia Osetska and her daughter Kristina pick blueberries at Venechuk Farm. Photo by Handout photo by Yulia Osetska

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The family kept coming back, and not for the produce.

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“I lacked home,” she said. “I went there on purpose to talk to girls from Ukraine, to find new friends.”

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Liubov Moroz found the farm through a Facebook post about an Easter market and drove out with a friend. The women selling cherry buns told her about the gatherings. Now she buys her eggs there every week.

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The farm, she said, offers the thing that is hardest to find here.

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“It creates a kind of homey warmth that you really miss in Canada, when you’re constantly in your routine, and your family is far away.”

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Liubov Moroz sits among hay bales inside the barn at Venechuk Farm Photo by Handout Liubov Moroz

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It isn’t the only farm Ukrainians seek out. Several women mentioned a berry farm in Richmond they also visit. But that one, Rukavchuk said, is for picking fruit.

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“People don’t come to Blake’s to pick berries. They come to rest,” she said.

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Not everyone who comes is a newcomer to Canada.

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At an Easter festival and pysanka-painting workshop that organizer Iryna Mitnovych brought to the farm, longtime Canadians and older diaspora turned up alongside the recent arrivals, reaching for something half-remembered.

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“They had such a nostalgic burst of emotion,” she said. My grandmother used to paint these, they told her.

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Blake Venechuk at his Langley farm. Photo by Jason Payne /PNG

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Celene Hoag knows the feeling. A second-generation Canadian raised in Delta, she lost her Ukrainian heritage early — her grandfather died when she was two, her Ukrainian grandmother when she was six.

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“After that, there wasn’t a lot of Ukrainian culture, because there was nobody to pass it on,” she said.

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At the farm’s Ukrainian Christmases, the food and the music handed some of it back, and gave her something to pass on to her own children.

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Her grandfather’s story is the one she keeps returning to.

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He arrived from Ukraine in 1929, at 17, with no English and no one but an uncle who ran a logging camp in Revelstoke. When the camp closed during the Depression, he rode the rails, sleeping rough and going hungry. Once, starving, he was given a jar of honey by a woman near the tracks — he ate it so fast, so desperately, that he was sick. He never touched honey again.

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He settled in New Westminster, married another Ukrainian, and started the family Hoag was born into.

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A century later, Hoag keeps bees and makes honey of her own. She won’t say her grandfather is the reason — she’s loved bees all her life — but, she said, “It makes it more meaningful to me.”

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The parallel she draws is between him and the Ukrainians arriving now. He came alone, with nothing, and no one waiting.

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“He didn’t have any community or support. He was just all alone, trying to build this,” Hoag said.

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The families finding their way to the farm in Langley are, in one sense, where he was — displaced, starting over, far from home.

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In another, they are luckier. They have somewhere to go.

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Reporter Oksana Shtohryn is a Postmedia summer intern who was born and raised in Ukraine before moving to Canada in 2023. Some interviews for this story were conducted in Ukrainian and translated by the reporter.

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