Oksana Marko

Entreprenuer & Ukranian Bridge

There are mornings when everything feels like too much. When the body is tired and the heart is tired and you cannot quite locate the thing that will pull you back to yourself. One of those mornings, I thought of Oksana.

She and a small team of young Ukrainian women clean my Airbnb ranch home in Michigan. She always shows up. Her girls are excellent. They leave the place spotless every time. She is no-nonsense in the way of someone who has learned not to waste anything, time, energy, or attention. 

I watched her crew grow over the last few summers. First a young cousin arrived from Ukraine and joined the team. Then another. The following year, more. The business she was building was quietly changing lives, and that made me want to support her more. The morning I thought of Oksana and felt steadier, I knew it was time to tell her story.

Oksana Marko came to Michigan in May 2018 with her eighteen-month-old daughter Inna, joining her husband who had already settled there. She left Ukraine for him, for family, for the possibility of something more stable than what she could see ahead. She arrived with more hope than certainty. Everything was unfamiliar, the language, the culture, the everyday routines that everyone else seemed to navigate without thinking. While Inna attended a small Ukrainian-speaking daycare, Oksana enrolled in ESL classes at Oakland Community College and took whatever work she could find. She started in residential cleaning, learning the industry from the ground up, learning what it meant to earn someone's trust inside their home. In October 2019, her son Vladyslav was born. Slowly, America became home.

Then, on February 24, 2022, everything changed.

Like millions of Ukrainians living abroad, she woke up to the news that Russia had launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Her thoughts went immediately to her parents, her brother, her relatives, her friends. She watched the news constantly while trying to reassure the people she loved, even though she was terrified herself. Every day carried the same question: how can I help?

She started with the people she loved most. She spent countless hours researching immigration options, preparing visitor visa applications, navigating a system she was learning entirely from scratch. Her husband's parents were approved. Her own parents were denied. That day broke her heart. She didn't stop. When the United for Ukraine humanitarian parole program was announced, she found another way.

The first person to arrive was her younger brother. She had absolutely no idea what she was doing. She didn't know which documents came first, which government office to visit, how long each step would take. They lost valuable time simply because she was learning in real time. Her brother never complained. He trusted her. Together they figured it out, and every mistake became a lesson. By the time the next family arrived she already knew more. By the third family she had built her own system. Each new arrival benefited from everything she had learned from the ones before them.

When it was finally her parents' turn, she knew the process cold. She was more nervous than she had ever been. She checked every document over and over again, terrified of missing something important. More than anything, she wanted to see them standing beside her, finally safe.

The day they arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, her husband and children were with her. She kept watching the arrivals board even though she knew the plane had landed. Then the doors opened. She saw her mother and father walking toward her and she immediately started crying. They hugged for a long time without saying much, because words weren't enough. They had been separated by an ocean and by a war. Then her children ran to their grandparents, and that, she says, was one of the happiest moments of her life. "For the first time in a long time," she says, "I could breathe without constantly worrying about whether they would be okay."

What followed became, as she puts it, a chain of people helping one another. Her cousin and his wife arrived. Then more relatives. Then close friends. Then entire families with children. Her brother eventually became a sponsor himself. Her father, who had once arrived through the same program, became a sponsor for her sister-in-law. What started as saving one person became something she could not have planned and cannot fully explain. When they finally counted, her family had helped bring 32 Ukrainians safely to the United States.

Sponsorship was only the beginning. When people arrived, they had almost nothing. Most spoke very little English. No Social Security numbers, no driver's licenses, no transportation, no understanding of how the American system worked. For nearly three years, helping them became her second full-time job alongside running her business and raising her children. She drove people to the Social Security Administration and the Secretary of State. She translated documents, filled out applications, searched for apartments, helped people buy their first cars, connected them with employers. Some of the men found work in trucking and construction. Many of the women joined her cleaning team, women who had just arrived in America needing work, needing confidence, needing someone who had already walked the same road.

"Looking back now, those three years almost feel as though they disappeared from my own life," she says. "There was always another family arriving. Another appointment to attend. Another problem to solve. Another person who simply needed someone to stand beside them." Her children often stayed with grandparents or relatives because she was constantly moving. It was exhausting. It was also one of the most meaningful chapters of her life.

One of the moments she will never forget had nothing to do with paperwork. Her cousin's wife arrived pregnant, scheduled for a cesarean section. Early that morning they drove to the hospital together. Oksana was allowed to be in the operating room. She watched a baby girl, Milanka, come into the world. What moved her most was the peace surrounding that moment. There were no air raid sirens. No fear that the electricity might go out. No uncertainty about whether doctors could finish the delivery safely. At that same time, mothers in Ukraine were giving birth during missile attacks, rushing to bomb shelters, wondering if hospitals would have power. Milanka's first moments were surrounded only by love. More recently, her sister-in-law also gave birth to a healthy baby boy in the United States. "Every time I think about those children," Oksana says, "I feel overwhelming gratitude. They were born in safety. That reminds me why every late night, every mile driven, every sacrifice was worth it."

She still has family and close friends in Ukraine. Their conversations begin like any family's, work, children, everyday life. But the war is always there in the background, and she feels it the moment the call connects. One of her first questions is always the same: how was your night? Sometimes the answer is that they didn't sleep because of the air raid sirens. Sometimes they describe missile attacks. Sometimes they simply say they are tired. "It is incredibly difficult," she says, "knowing that while I can tuck my own children safely into bed each night, the people I love continue living with uncertainty." She has asked that question hundreds of times now. She will keep asking it until the answer changes.

At home in Michigan, Ukraine is alive. Her children speak Ukrainian. They dance with Kolomiyka, a Ukrainian folk dance ensemble. Every Saturday they attend Ukrainian school, learning to read and write in their mother tongue, studying the history of where they come from. Before the war, they spent every summer in Ukraine with family. Their connection to their homeland comes not only from her stories but from their own memories. She wants them to carry both homes in their hearts.

She would tell you she simply wanted to save the people she loved. That it became a purpose surprised her as much as anyone. "Kindness has a ripple effect," she says. "One person helps another. That person helps someone else. Before you realize it, an entire community has been transformed."

I believe her. I have seen it, season by season, at my ranch home in Michigan, watching her crew grow one young Ukrainian woman at a time. Oksana Marko doesn't need recognition. She needs you to know the work is happening, and that one act of compassion, offered freely to one person, can travel further than you will ever be able to trace.

Oksana Marko owns and operates  ProShine Cleaning Services, a residential cleaning business in Michigan.