Flea Market Purchase Leads to Pen Pals, Ukraine Visit

Little did he know when he thrust his hand into a box of souvenir documents from the former Soviet Union that he was about to lend a hand to two Ukrainian families.

But that’s what happened to Henry Sakaida two years ago when he plucked a pair of yellowing identification cards from a seller’s box at a Pomona flea market and bought them for $1 each.

On a whim, Sakaida wrote to two elderly women whose names and addresses appeared on officially stamped ID cards.

“How is life in Kiev?” he asked.

To his shock, they wrote back.

Both women commented that life for their aging generation was very difficult indeed.

Sakaida, a 46-year-old nursery owner who lives in Temple City, responded by surprising both women with cartons of food shipped to their homes. He followed that up with 14 more food shipments to each.

Last week, he flew to the Ukraine to surprise them with boxes of chocolates--candy he planned to deliver in person.

“They’ve kept telling me, ‘Come on over, come on over’--that they want to meet me,” said Sakaida before he departed for Kiev. “So I decided to go meet them.”

Actually, Sakaida feels as if he already knows 63-year-old Lubov Brakalova, 62-year-old Valentina Pavlova and their families.

For the past two years, the three of them have exchanged snapshots and details of their lives--his as a wholesale landscape businessman and aviation history buff and theirs as former Soviet pharmaceutical plant workers struggling in the new Ukrainian economy.

Sakaida has assembled albums that are filled with Brakalova and Pavlova family photos, letters and the old ID cards that triggered their friendship.

These days Brakalova works in a children’s day-care center and lives with her husband on a collective farm outside Kiev.

Pavlova is a pensioner who lives on $26 a month. Her husband, a night watchman, was killed at work four months ago by robbers--a symbol of how crime in the former Soviet republics has climbed since Russia and the successor states have endeavored to create freer markets.

“Their lives are hard,” Sakaida said. “In their first letters, they wrote that things were bad. That’s when I decided to send each of them a care package with things like Spam, honey and instant coffee.”

The vendor selling the boxful of old ID cards at the flea market had tried to dissuade Sakaida from trying to contact the women--whose stern-faced photos are affixed to the documents.

The papers were old, he pointed out, and the women probably had moved on if they were still alive in the former Soviet Union, which dissolved more than six years ago. In any event, it was unlikely they spoke any English, he told Sakaida.

But Sakaida, who studied Russian in a foreign language class he took in 1969 as a student at Rosemead High School, was able to read portions of the documents.

The identification papers, it turned out, were trade union membership cards. They showed that Brakalova had been a freight handler at the pharmaceutical plant and Pavlova had worked as a packager.

He purchased $93.69 worth of food at a supermarket near his home for his first gift package to Pavlova. He was jolted to find that it would cost more than $100 to mail it to Kiev, however.

By accident, Sakaida found a cheaper way to send the food. At an Orange County pizza stand, he had a chance encounter with a Russian immigrant who tipped him off about a Glendale organization that specializes in shipping packages of food and clothing to the Ukraine and neighboring countries. That organization, called Meest-California, delivered Sakaida’s food box for about $40.

Meest supervisor Irina Stadnik said the shipping service, based at 500 E. Harvard St., was started nine years ago in Canada to assist Soviet immigrants eager to help relatives back home. Since then it has branched out from humanitarian work to serve commercial clients attempting to tap into the new countries’ emerging free-market economy.

But that new system has created even more of a need for assistance from abroad for many Ukrainians and others, said Stadnik, a 40-year-old former Soviet technical engineer who immigrated eight years ago to Hollywood.

“The prices have gone up due to inflation. There is lower pay for jobs over there, especially for old people,” Stadnik said.

Meest--which she said means “bridge” in Russian--fills a 40-foot container and sends it by cargo ship every two weeks. She said workers at the other end personally deliver the parcels and packages, preventing pilferage that plagues some post offices there.

Sakaida said his wife, Donna, opted not to make the 10-day Ukrainian trip after learning that Pavlova and Brakalova live fairly close to the contaminated Chernobyl nuclear plant.

But a Temple City friend whose fiance lives in Kiev is accompanying him. Sakaida said the man looked in on his two adopted families on a previous visit to the Ukraine.

“He reported back that I didn’t need to send over any more cake mix,” Sakaida said.

On Thursday, Sakaida was toting See’s chocolates, canned ham and bottles of California wine for the two women as he left for Kiev.

Plus a few pairs of blue jeans for the women’s granddaughters.