You're reading: American comes for love, but set to leave dejected

Found sick by social workers, the U.S. citizen will return home.

It took Cary Dalego, a former write-in candidate for governor of Arizona, more than $5,000 and almost half of a year to fall in love with a Ukrainian woman, whose profile on a marriage agency website turned out be a fake.

But as a result, the 53-year-old American man ended up homeless in Chernivtsi in western Ukraine, where he had hoped to meet the love of his life.

Now Dalego is planning to return to the United States on Nov. 23, but he is not giving up his dream of returning to find a Ukrainian bride.

Dalego’s story looks like a grotesque version of hundreds of other Western men who come to Ukraine to find a relationship, and end up bitterly disappointed.
He came to Ukraine in late spring, planning to find academic support for his engineering ideas as well as a wife.

Leaving the United States, he sold his house, motorcycle and car as his “intent was to marry here and apply for registration, not planning to return to the USA ever again,” he said.

Dalego claims that, while studying at the state university of Arizona, he came up with ideas on how to save thousands of lives. He says he found the solutions that prevent vessels and ships from sinking and aircraft from exploding and burning “following an air disaster of some sort.” He doesn’t elaborate, however.

He lived in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv for two months in search of academic support for his ideas.

There is a shipbuilding university located there, and he sought an audience with its professor. It never happened, however, because the professor “seemed skeptical” about his ideas, which he read in an email, Dalego said.

Disappointed, he went on to Simferopol in Crimea, and decided to concentrate on his personal life when he realized that the professional one was not working out.
This is when he met Yulia on the Ukrainian Brides marriage agency website.

“She sent me a little smile or something saying hello, and that’s what started the emailing,” remembers Dalego. He says she wrote him that he was the one she wanted to marry.

But the young woman lived in Chernivtsi. Dalego liked her so much that he hopped on a train to Chernivtsi in early November, waiting to embrace his new found love on arrival to the train station. She didn’t show up. And he got stuck.

Because he has stayed in Ukraine for about six months, his documents and cards have now expired, so he ended up homeless living in Chernivtsi train station, hard on cash and suffering from pneumonia.

He was found by social workers from Narodna Dopomoha charity and delivered to the Chernivtsi Oblast hospital. He has stayed there since Nov.11.

“He feels better now,” says Svitlana Kovalenko, head of the pulmonological department where Dalego has been staying. “The hospital pays for his medical care, and people feed him. Some guys from a local protestant church and caring women bring him food every day.”

He even got to meet the lady he came for after journalists called her. The meeting disappointed.

“Yulia got a profile at the [marriage] agency, and there was some man behind that profile. Yulia knew nothing about me,” Dalego says matter-of-factly.

He says he liked her a lot, but the interest wasn’t mutual. “She called me twice, sent me an SMS, telling that she planned to visit me the next day, promised to bring lunch, but then she said she was busy,” says Dalego. “At first I thought it would go somewhere but now I don’t think it will.”

He has given up on Yulia, but not the idea to find a Slavic wife.

“Slavic ladies are making the best wives,” he says. “They don’t quit on their husbands, they don’t get tired of their husbands and try to get rid of them. They don’t disrespect their husbands. They know how to sew and bake and cook – they can do things that American women don’t know how to do. Americans are career women, and I want to find a lady that wants to be my life partner.”

But that will have to wait. He is planning to fly to the U.S. on Nov. 23, where he has three children and a granddaughter. Dalego plans to run for governor of Arizona again.

His first attempt in 2010 failed miserably – he only got 0.01 percent of the vote as a Green Party write-in candidate. But once again, he is not deterred. “The people of Arizona deserve an alternative candidate,” he says.

He also says he wants to return to Ukraine with a long-term visa.

And lessons learned? Don’t trust marriage agencies, go to the village to find your wife, Dalego says.

Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected].

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