The Life That's Chosen Me - From Russia With Love
Description
Making personal sacrifices for your partner's career is one thing, creating a home in several countries while at the same time caring for a severely disabled child is another. We caught up with Rachelle Rosolofo-Czerwinski to talk about her new memoir, The Life That's Chosen Me - From Russia With Love.
TRANSCRIPT
The Life That’s Chosen Me – From Russia With Love
It's time again for DDA's Encouraging Abilities podcast. I am your host, DDA Communications Manager, Evan Kelly. Joining me today is Rochelle Rosa I'm hoping I'm saying that correctly. You do. That's a difficult one. Now Rochelle has an amazing story to tell, which she has brought to life in a new memoir called The Life That's Chosen Me From Russia With Love. It is available on Amazon and it's a very well written and fairly quick read if you're interested in picking it up.
travel writing, part diving into the culture and language of other countries, part learning to do that with a family of four where one child has a severe developmental disabilities. Rochelle was born in Madagascar, raised in France, and then married a German Canadian who worked high up with the United Nations, and it's a job that took her husband, Chris, to East and West Africa, Italy, China, Egypt, and then over to Russia.
To me it sounds like an amazing life, but of course there are hardships and difficulties along the way because it's not just about traveling freely, it's uprooting, it's making big changes, it's moving for a partner's profession, it's creating homes, even learning new languages, all with a child who needs extra care. Rochelle and her family, which includes her two sons Mike and Nicholas, now reside in Vancouver and we're of course happy to have them back here. So thank you for joining me today, Rochelle. Thank you, Ivan, for having me.
Now, it's clear you've led a very interesting life. Before we talk about disabilities, not everyone can do what you did. That's getting up and moving for a spouse whose job has changed, especially with an entire family. How difficult was that for you? To tell the truth, at the beginning, it was not. I just took it in stride, you know, and here I am, a new bride, and my job was to follow my husband.
I just thought when I came from Madagascar that we would settle in Canada. So little did I know that six months after settling down in Vancouver, my husband announced that we go into Africa. And from there, you know, after Africa it was Italy, and as you mentioned, then after Italy it was China, and then Egypt, and finally Russia. And I think in Russia I started feeling a little tired.
Globetrotting, I guess, as it were. Yeah. That must have been, like I said, it's not just traveling freely without kids when you're young or something like that. It's literally recreating home wherever you are. I mean, is that a difficult thing for you to do, or do you just take that on as a challenge?
I took that on as a challenge, but as time went by, it became more and more difficult. Like you're losing your friends and you have to look for new schools and create new homes. And of course, you know, with a child with special needs, and our son Nicholas had severe, significant special needs, it became harder to find therapies for him.
physiotherapies and speech therapies and this and that. So it's difficult enough if you stay in the same city like Vancouver, but imagine if you have to move country and not just country, but continent because actually change continent each time. Yeah. Well, exactly. And obviously there's some cultural things we can dive into as well, but you also mentioned that you've learned multiple languages. How many languages can you speak now? More or less fluently, five I think. French is really my first language.
I came to Vancouver, but because we did everything in English, I kind of picked English. I did learn English in school. And you may still hear a little French accent here and there. Oh, of course. No, more than a little. More than a little? Okay. And that's been like 20 years in Vancouver now. But you also, can you speak Chinese?
I did study Chinese for a semester in post-secondary and that was one of the most impossible things I've ever taken on. So I doff my hat to you to be able to do that. And did you learn a bunch of Russian then as well? I learned Russian during our two years in Russia. Russia was not as easy for me. I think if you read the book, I mentioned that.
I have more difficulty when it is a different alphabet as well. When it is a Roman alphabet, French and English share the same alphabet. Most European languages like German, like Italian, which I speak too. French. We share the same ABC. Yes, the romantic languages, right? Right. But when it came to Russian, they used the Cyrillic alphabet.
When it comes to Chinese, they use those hieroglyphs, those pictograms, and so then it becomes more difficult. So in those countries, I learned more to talk and to understand. I didn't put too much energy in learning to read and write because I knew it would take me years, and yeah, so yeah. So was it a bit of a relief to get back to Canada? Absolutely. And when did you come back to Canada? What year was that?
So I arrived in Canada from Madagascar in 1984 to get married and we started our Nomadic life soon after that and we came then back for good to Canada in 2005 now is your husband still working in Russia or is he for here for good now to be in Canada He's back in Canada for good. Yeah. Oh, that's good. And is he still working with the United Nations here? Or is it something different he's doing? Well, he does some consultation work. So
at least we'll be based in Canada, which is providing more stability for the family. But then he did some consultation work in Africa, in Asia, and yeah. Now, tell me about your sons. Michael, he's your typically developed son. He must be, I'm guessing, pushing 30 now? You're guessing right, he's 36. And Nicolas.
our young adult, but still a big baby in many ways. And Nicolas is now 35. Oh, so they're, yeah. So what is, you talk about in your book about Mike, trying to adapt in a variety of different schools in different countries, which must have been a challenge for him at the same time. I was thinking, when I was reading this book, how he probably looks back on that with a certain fondness and he's got this incredible life story behind him now. So what is he doing with himself now?
So now he works in, he used to run his own company. And then when COVID hit, you know, that kind of took a dive like many small companies. And now he's working with a concrete making company in Coquitlam. Nice. Yeah. Nice. And so how's Nicolas doing? And Nicolas is well settled in his own life. He doesn't live with us anymore. It does, it cannot live alone.
because of his special needs, but he shares a house with another person with disabilities and with a team of support workers. So very, very much like what DDA does for our clients, but like you mentioned, you're working with Spectrum organization. And how is, does he like living on, I guess I should say, how long has he been living on his own? And so I think he started living on his own in 2009.
That was a big transition for me because as I said he's still like a big baby and of course for a mother to let go of a baby no matter his size or his weight or whatever, he's still a baby. And so that was that big transition for me to let him go, yeah. And does he enjoy being apart from you? Is he enjoying his independence? Yeah, he has a fairly structured life. He goes swimming on Wednesday, Science World on Thursday, music on Tuesday.
a library on other days. I think he's going to outlive all of us. Well, that's good. I mean, it sounds like he's really enjoying his life. Let's go way back though. Like when you first knew that Nicholas was gonna have problems, how did you feel about that? And how did you deal with that? So I remember that clearly, that was in Africa. We were in this small African country that's called Djibouti. And...
And Djibouti is one of the hottest countries in the world. It's like 45 degrees Celsius at night. So during the day it's even more. And so the habit of people there is to have a nap. Otherwise you cannot survive. Nobody works between 12. It's the siesta, I guess. La siesta, exactly. Everybody's away and have a nap.
between 12 and three, and most organizations would only open until one, and then everybody's off until the evening. And I remember clearly one time we were having a nap, and my husband got up and he told me Nicolas is doing some funny things. And, you know, I was a new mom, Nicolas was two months old, maybe three, I said, oh, you know, he's just a baby. And my husband said, I think he's doing really some strange things. And so finally I got up.
And yeah, and they had no experience at all about seizures, but he was having seizures, yeah. So that was quite a shock, yeah. And that sort of, and then at that point you knew like, okay, there's some developmental things going on here. Exactly, so luckily, my husband had more experience in seizures than me because he had volunteered with L'Arche, which is a big organization, and they are everywhere in the world.
and he had done a ga
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