Elena Boryuk seeks more opportunities for herself and her family through Kirkwood classes and a supportive community
A discussion with Elena Boryuk is a multi-sensory experience. She displays continual, probing eye contact, her blue eyes at once open, enquiring–and wary. With only a few years of English experience, she already has a strong vocabulary and notable confidence in this, her fourth functioning language. Often, she gestures with her hands as if dealing cards from a deck. She seems to be considering those various cards, of good and ill fortune she and her family have been dealt in the past decade, spanning half a planet.
Boryuk is a native of Moscow, Russia. She and her husband, Georgian Irakliy Surguladze came to Iowa as refugees from discrimination and potentially greater dangers in 2007. Boryuk remembers the growing tensions between the couple’s homelands creating a no-win situation in both areas. By this time, Russia was beginning forced deportations of Georgians. The situation was steadily worsening.
“We tried to live in Moscow and my husband felt discrimination because he was from Georgia. We tried to live in Georgia and it was opposite, I was the one getting discrimination. We went to American embassy and asked for asylum,” she recalled.
The U.S. officials told the couple that the best route would be to go to America as tourists, then ask for asylum there. With a long-time friend living in Iowa City as a familiar connection, the couple and their three young children made it to Johnson County and started setting up a new home. They opened a fledgling business, Green Way Landscaping—and continued their quest for asylum in the U.S.
A multi-year struggle of applications, agreements, denials and appeals followed as the couple argued the declining atmosphere, armed conflict and personal threats to Surguladze made a return to their home countries dangerous. The family of five was about to become six, with a new baby expected soon. Although safe at the moment, they were in a legal limbo.
A June 27, 2011, asylum ruling from a federal judge in Omaha buoyed the family. Two weeks later, a government prosecutor overturned that ruling, saying he believed the family could safely return to one of their native lands. That threw the case to the Board of Immigration Appeals and a potential wait of a year or more.
The atmosphere of uncertainty was maddening for Boryuk, Surguladze and their family—and their growing neighborhood of Iowa friends. One supporter quoted in an Iowa City Press-Citizen story fumed, “These are our tax dollars being used to keep the best family out of the U.S.”
Finally, in late October 2011, came the final, welcome news: Federal prosecutors were dropping the appeal. Documents allowing the family to stay in the United States arrived soon after. The 40-something couple and their young children could proceed with their lives as American residents.
A relieved Elena Boryuk was elated. “We are free. We stay here,” she said at the time.
Almost two years on, classes and learning are also key goals for both Elena and Irikily. Both are students in the English Language Acquisition coursework at Kirkwood Community College, with some classes held in Cedar Rapids and others at Kirkwood’s Iowa City Campus on Lower Muscatine Road. Both are finding the reading, writing and speaking skills invaluable as they continue to grow the family landscaping business and deepen their ties in the Iowa City/Coralville community.
“My family and friends back in Russia wrote to me and said, ‘You are a woman from large city of Moscow. How can you live in cornfield?’ I tell them that in this cornfield are amazing and wonderful people! We have received such wonderful support from Iowa people,” she said.
One of the family’s supportive friends is Kirkwood Associate Professor of English Olga Petrova. She met the couple and their children soon after they arrived in Iowa, and pronounces Elena’s progress as “incredible and remarkable,” for academics and overall adjustment.
“I met Elena long before she became my student. Since then, I have observed in awe how in the most desperate situations, she would never lose hope. She definitely lives in accordance with my favorite Russian proverb: the eyes are afraid but the hands are doing. She never allows a fear of unknown or seemingly insurmountable to cripple her,” she said.
Petrova is the main ELA instructor on Kirkwood’s Iowa City Campus on Lower Muscatine Road. She calls Boryuk “one of my top students” in her classes, and also marvels at the many tasks and roles she juggles on any given day.
Elena has made incredible progress in English over the past years. While her background in other foreign languages has definitely contributed to her success, when coupled with her enviable motivation and attitude, “it works miracles,” Petrova added. “In a record short time, Elena has become a fully competent and completely functional member of our local community. She is a highly intelligent, incredibly hard-working and perseverant woman. With no extended family to support her, Elena has been raising four kids, nursing her youngest child, helping her husband with accounting and customer service in their landscaping business, interacting with their clients daily both orally and in writing, computing taxes both for her family and their business, and sending me homework. Sometimes that homework arrives in my email at four in the morning.”
That persistence continues, into the summer of 2013, the family’s sixth year in America. Boryuk thinks her many years of work experience and multi-national wisdom have helped her study and embrace English. She spent several years in Rome, working for an Italian company before moving back to Moscow to represent that business in her native Russia, along with other Continental language skills along the way in her Euro-based professional experience.
She pauses and appears to mull an idea. Then, in a confident voice she continues.
“I believe that if you have one language, you have one life. If you can speak two languages, you have two lives. It is not just language. You can understand people, the writing and feelings, the daily things.”
A smile broadens on Elena Boryuk’s world-wise face.
“I now have four lives. I am lucky, and thankful for that for me and my family. It is a wonderful thing!”