When it comes to Ukraine’s relationship with Portugal, it’s been mostly a one-way street – leading to Lisbon, not Kyiv.
No more than 40 Portuguese reside permanently in Ukraine, according to the embassy of Portugal in Ukraine. However, as many as 53,000 Ukrainians live legally in Portugal. Perhaps nearly as many live there illegally as well.
The exodus started at least 10 years ago. Driven out of Ukraine by economic doldrums, thousands of highly educated Ukrainians found work in construction and as babysitters in Portugal. Many have stayed, finding better lives and becoming known in Portugal for their advanced degrees, hard work and adaptability.
“It is sad to see highly educated people doing jobs that they shouldn’t be doing. But it looks like they are in Portugal not only for wages, but for its good attitude.
Spain and Italy can offer more [money],” said Luciano Abreu, one of the Portugese citizens now living in Kyiv.
Theories vary, but it seems that the Portuguese – immigrants escaping poverty under the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar and his successor from 1930s to 1970s – sympathize with the Ukrainians who left their homeland for Portugal.
Both Luciano and his wife, Helena, encountered Ukrainians in their home country. “My friend’s nanny is a pediatrician from Ukraine. Isn’t it a dream to have a doctor around your kids and pay a nanny’s wage?” said Helena Abreu.
And what led the Abreus to go against the grain and come to Ukraine?
They made an exploratory trip on a warm July night in 2009, and liked what they saw and heard. “It should be very safe here,” said Luciano, marketing manager at Philip Morris. So he brought his wife and two children here – increasing the Portuguese community in Kyiv by 25 percent.
It was not as safe as he thought it was. “I just feel like people who drive expensive cars here think that they could do anything they want – that’s something I won’t ever get used to,” said Luciano after a recent car accident. He’s also tasted some of Ukraine’s low-level corruption from traffic police. “While corruption exists in most of the countries, it is disguised. Here it’s in the open.”
While significant Portugese investments are in Odesa, Kharkiv and Rivne, other Portuguese here work for international companies, diplomatic missions or stay in the country for family reasons.
Alex Pinto, 46, originally from Lisbon, is one of them. Meeting a Ukrainian woman online, he decided to quit his clothes business in Lisbon and move to Poltava.
“Right from the beginning my wife said that she wouldn’t move anywhere from Ukraine, because she has a job that she likes and a loving family here,” Pinto said. “She said that she looked for love and a husband that she could trust.”
The owner of FH dating agency now, he gets some blame for reinforcing the country’s sex-tourist image. But, he said, it was the online dating agency that changed his life for the better by introducing him to his current wife. Now, four years later, he said he would have never gone online himself in search of a wife if he knew then about international dating what he knows now.
“When love becomes a business, it starts getting dirty. Women here do have an inner beauty that helps create strong partnerships. But foreign men too often look for a gorgeous wife, 20 years younger than them and who would love them unconditionally. In 80 percent of the cases they fail,” Pinto said.
For the two years that Pinto has been in the business owning the same agency that introduced him to his wife, he has witnessed three marriages and is a godfather to a child of one of the couples. None of the marriages happened between people who met on the website, but rather involved women that foreigners met on their occasional “love trips.”
Here in Ukraine, Pinto also learned the happiness of fatherhood, he said, spending more time with his baby-daughter. “In Portugal, the child would be sent to the babysitter six months after a woman gives birth. But here my wife can stay with her until the child is three years old,” he said.
But, to the question about whether he would stay in Ukraine forever, he said that everything depends on Ukraine’s economic and political course. In other words, he could join the Ukrainians who left Ukraine for Portugal.
“I keep a house and a car in Lisbon,” Pinto said. “If things start getting worse and my wife agrees, I’ll move my family there right away.”
Read also ‘Portugal’s ambassador: ‘We would appreciate’ better rule of law, democracy, judiciary’.
Kyiv Post staff writer Katya Grushenko can be reached at [email protected]
