Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hi, everyone, this is Dawn Clem, and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and monarchs.
[00:00:07] Today, in keeping with my same theme, I'll be sharing another story with you of ordinary becoming extraordinary.
[00:00:19] It's my greatest pleasure to tell the story today of one of my dearest friends who lives in Portland, Mississippi, Maine. Her name is Lincoln. I first met Linca in 1997.
[00:00:35] Linka was working as a certified nursing assistant and I was hired as a registered nurse. Both of us worked on the three to eleven shift.
[00:00:47] Many times a nurse's nursing assistant is assigned directly to work with an RN. And that's how Linca and I came to know each other. She had the same patient assignment that I did, so we kind of teamed up together. And what that meant was she helped me with everything that I needed to do with my patients.
[00:01:10] She would help me walk them, she would help me toilet them. She would let me know if the patient was in pain, she would let me know if the iv was running low. Any concern that was going on with the patient, Linka would be there to tell me what was going on.
[00:01:28] It didn't take long for us to become fast friends. As a matter of fact, I felt like I had known her all my life already when I started working with her that year. During the holidays, we decided to get our families together and we came over to Lincoln's house and got to meet her husband and both of her children at that time. And Linka made a bunch of sweet treats from which were customary from her native country of Bulgaria. So it was kind of exciting for us to have friends that were from a different culture and to be able to talk to them and share information with them about each other. And we were really enjoying our friendship quite a bit. And it was during one of those meetings with them that we learned of their incredible journey to the United States. And that's the story that I'm going to tell today.
[00:02:32] So Linka was born in 1954 in Montana, Bulgaria.
[00:02:39] She had a nuclear family of two parents and a younger sister.
[00:02:45] She had always wanted to be a doctor her whole life. That's really what she wanted to do. But her father had a different plan for her.
[00:02:56] She explained it to me like they had two different schools of education there. Kind of like a prep school, I would say. So one school was based in mathematics and accounting, and the other school was based in the sciences and maybe more medically based. So her father said that he didn't really want her to go into the sciences and become a doctor because he did not feel that she would get the patronage and respect as a female physician in Bulgaria. Bulgaria is, then it was a communist country.
[00:03:44] Now it's a socialist country, but I would say it's on the line, really. It's similar to some of these other countries like China.
[00:03:56] You can go in and out and visit there, but living there is not an easy feat.
[00:04:03] So Linca honored her father's request, and she went through the prep school for mathematics. She got through school, and then she went on to college, and she graduated with an accounting degree from college.
[00:04:21] Her job became as a director of a food supply chain for the villages of Montana.
[00:04:31] The villages I define as something like the suburbs of a big city.
[00:04:38] So each village had their own leader there that was over the patient or the people population.
[00:04:48] And what she would do is she had three warehouses and in each warehouse. The first warehouse had flour, sugar, spices, oil, bread, alcoholic beverages. That's good to know, right.
[00:05:08] The second warehouse had beans, rice, coffee, noodles, that kind of thing. And then the third one was for household cleaning products, laundry detergent, dishwashing detergent, personal hygiene materials, that kind of thing. So her job as the director was to ration out to each leader of the village their allotment for the people, and then the leader of the village would actually dole out the goods to the individual families.
[00:05:51] When I was talking to her about it, I go, oh, so like you were over a Costco or a Sam's club, right? She was laughing at me.
[00:05:59] I mean, it's similar to that, but not really, because it was broken up into three warehouses, and the individual person is not allowed to shop there.
[00:06:15] The director manages how much each village gets, and then the leader of the village manages how much each, each of the individual family would get.
[00:06:31] So that's how that went.
[00:06:35] So she was working one day with her colleague, and Tekko, her future husband, walked across the parking lot, and her colleagues said, oh, there goes Teko. I know him. I went to college with him. He's really, really smart. He graduated second highest in our class.
[00:06:54] Do you think you would like to meet him? And Linka said, yes, I would love to meet him.
[00:07:01] And so her colleague introduced her to Teco, and right away there was a connection. They started dating, and they dated for about six months. And then Teko looked at her one day and said, well, what do you think? Would you like to get married? And she said, yes, I'd like to get married. And so she got married, and she said it was the funniest thing because everybody in the whole country of Bulgaria always gets married on a Saturday. No one ever deviates from that. But her and Teko decided to get married on a Friday, and she said her father was so mad at her. But that's really, really the story of Tacko and Linka, right there. They were independent thinkers.
[00:07:52] So what Taeko was doing for work at that time when she saw him is he was actually in an executive leader position, an executive director over a warehouse as well. But his warehouse was for food production, so he was over things like fertilizer, grain feed for the animals, anything like that related to, similar to, like if you were to have a co op. So he had seeds to grow plants, he had the fertilizer to grow the plants, and everybody was sharing these plants plots. And then he would allot how much would go to each individual co op. So I said, oh, Linka. So he was over a tractor supply company, right? So she was over Sam's and Costco and he was over the tractor supply company, and she just cracked up at me. But I mean, that is how I kind of think about it, really.
[00:09:04] The only difference, and it is a huge difference, if you stop and think about it, is that they were directing how much went to the village, and then the village leader, like I said previously, doled out to the individual family.
[00:09:23] When I look at that, I think, wow, I have probably five grocery stores in about a two mile radius from me right now. All I do is hop in my car and go buy anything I need, anytime I want, and any time of day practically, because they're open 24 hours a day, some of them. And to have it all doled out to me, wow, that just, I mean, I think I would struggle with that. So I can understand why Teco questioned living in a socialist, communistic type environment.
[00:10:08] And that's really what happened. They got married. They ended up having a family. They had a son and a daughter they lived with their, her parents lived in the same building. I think they had like, it's a big house, and there were like four apartments in the house. So they all were together to help each other out. And if you see that, you would understand why because they just get an allotment for each group. So if they have all four families living there, then they were all able to help support each other. It's kind of an interesting concept.
[00:10:50] But anyhow, Teko was an independent thinker, and he started thinking all the time that he was dissatisfied with the government and the way things were doled out. Maybe he wouldn't have thought about that if that wasn't his job, but he, I know he struggled with, well, why? If they want to get ten more cows, why can't they get ten more cows? If we need more milk, why can't we get more cows? That kind of thing. So he was always rationalizing, why were we being told what to do? Why aren't we able to make our own way?
[00:11:30] He started talking to one of his colleagues, and his colleague felt exactly the way that he did. And then they started bringing it to a group of men.
[00:11:41] They created what they called like an underground meeting environment for all of them to get together and talk about how they would like to see the country of Bulgaria change, how they wanted a democracy there, they wanted the freedoms to be able to make decisions for themselves.
[00:12:01] They started writing a newspaper because they wanted to get the word out and see if people would be as interested in it as they were. And they would type up this newspaper and then they would put the newspaper, they would deliver it to eaves of buildings and they would get the word out that there's a new paper out. You have to check it in the eve. The police, in the meantime, had gotten suspicious and they knew that something was going on.
[00:12:32] It took them a long time to figure out where those darn newspapers were and I don't know if, if they actually found one on their own or if someone finally outed Teko and his group. But what happened? One day, Linka said she was at home. She was just getting up and getting ready to go to work. She wasn't even dressed yet and someone knocked on the door and then barged into her house. And it was two policemen and they were there to arrest Teko.
[00:13:06] So they hauled Teko off to jail and he did have his day in court. Of course, it wasn't going to be fair because it's a socialistic country.
[00:13:19] So he didn't really get to stick up for himself or anything like that. He just basically went to court to be sentenced and they sentenced him to two years in prison.
[00:13:31] Linka was completely beside herself, if you can just imagine. And I don't know how Taco felt.
[00:13:40] I'm sure he was devastated as well.
[00:13:44] But Linka's children were six and seven at the time.
[00:13:48] She's now a single parent. She's still working and luckily she did have her parents living in that building, so that was helpful. And her sister also live there, so she did have some people that she could rely on. And Teko's parents were also very helpful. She said his father was wonderful. He is the one that went to court with Teko, and then he's the one that came home and delivered the bad news to her. When he was sentenced to two years in prison, she said she cried herself to sleep every night. She had no idea if he was ever really going to be able to come home or not. And why wouldn't you feel like that? Because really, he committed a political crime. So usually he would have gotten worse than what he really did. He was. He was lucky that it was only two years in prison, but still. Terrible when you're trying to raise two young kids.
[00:14:47] The two years come to an end, and Tacko is indeed freed from prison, and he comes home, and it's a celebration to have him back home.
[00:14:58] But the next part of the journey began where he couldn't get a job anywhere. And you can imagine nobody was going to hire him. I mean, I believe in my mind, they were afraid to hire him because they know that he had bucked the system.
[00:15:15] It's hard to go up against a political system like that and have any recourse.
[00:15:22] He looked for a long time for a job, and finally he said, I'm going to have to go work in a mine somewhere. So Bulgaria has, like, twelve mines. They mine copper, uranium, bayrite.
[00:15:40] They have a lot of things like that there that they mine. And the mine that he was able to get a job with was an open pit mine outside of Sofia.
[00:15:53] Sofia is the capital of Bulgaria, and it's about a two hour drive from montana, where he was living, to the open pit mine.
[00:16:07] So he had to drive that every day, 2 hours down there and 2 hours back.
[00:16:12] If you know anything about Teco, like I do, you know that teco is a great thinker. There's no way that he wasn't thinking the whole entire time he was in prison and the whole entire time he was driving to that mine.
[00:16:30] What am I gonna do to make a better life for my family? What am I gonna do?
[00:16:38] Well, it just so happens that Teko was driving through Sofia, and lo and behold, there is the United States embassy.
[00:16:52] So Tekko decides at that point, I have to go in there, I have to tell them my story. I have to see if I'm going to be able to get some help from my family so that I can get the heck out of this country. I know they're going to be after me as long as I stay here, and I have to make a difference. I've got to see what they're going to, if they can help me.
[00:17:20] So he waits until there's an opportune time for him to go.
[00:17:26] You can imagine he's not going to be late for work because they're watching him, and he can't be late coming home because they're watching him. So he had to pick an opportune time where he would go in, and no one would know that he was going to meet in the embassy.
[00:17:46] And he managed to make an appointment, and he went in there and he told them his whole story of what had happened and what he was thinking and why he went along that pathway.
[00:18:02] And the embassy listened to what he had to say, and they made an appointment with him to speak to Amnesty International.
[00:18:14] That was probably the best day of his life, when he got to talk to Amnesty International because they said to him, we're going to help you, Tedco.
[00:18:27] We're going to get you out of Bulgaria, and we're going to take your whole family with you. So you are going to be moving.
[00:18:37] So they asked him, where do you want to go? And he said, I want to go to the United States. I want to go to a democracy. That was his number one thing. Just had to get to a democracy.
[00:18:50] So they said, okay, you can. We're going to get you to America.
[00:18:56] Do you have a place in mind that you would like to go? Do you want to go to California, or do you want to go to New York City?
[00:19:03] When I hear that story, I just laugh now, because when you think about where we're at at this point in time, we're looking at this crazy world where immigrants are coming, pouring into our country, and they're all going to California or New York City. I kind of understand California. That's a big state, and there's farming all over the place there. So that really wouldn't be a bad place to start out. But New York City, I would not be a big fan of going there. But it is the lure of the city that gets people there. It's exciting, and I think people think there's opportunities in a big city like that.
[00:19:45] I mean, years and years ago, in the early 19 hundreds, that's where my great grandparents came through. They came through New York and the Statue of Liberty and all of that. Back then, they came from Italy, and they immigrated into this country. So it really isn't that far fetched that they would offer up New York City and California. But Teco said no to both of them. He said, I really don't want to go to either one of those. They're too big for me. I would like something a little more rural.
[00:20:22] Do you have anything like that when he's telling the story? I was laughing, smiling so brightly, because it was almost like you're at a car dealership and you're negotiating a car deal, you know, do you have a different color? I need four seats and four doors, that kind of thing. It was funny, but anyhow, they said, well, what would you think about the state of Maine? That's rural? And he said, I love it. That sounds perfect for me.
[00:20:51] So he goes back home and he tells Lincoln, I've been working with the embassy. We're going to be getting out of here. We're moving to the United States. And Linka's like, what?
[00:21:02] I mean, I don't think any of them were really prepared, but you have to know there was no choice. There just was no choice.
[00:21:12] So they got the visas, and they got the travel plans for his family. Teko came first, and then Linka and the two children followed, and they ended up in Portland, Maine. Portland, Maine. By the way, here's my plug. I absolutely love it. It's one of the great cities of the northeast. If you ever have a chance to visit, please do. It's beautiful. There's lots to do.
[00:21:39] I think he made a great choice in picking Portland. And they were. They got a house, too. Lincoln said, don, how does this even happen? You get your visa, you get your travel paid for, and you come to a new house to live.
[00:21:58] That's what Amnesty International did for them.
[00:22:01] So they got here in 1990, and Teko was 40 or 41, and Linka was 36.
[00:22:13] So they came here with their two kids, and the kids were nine and ten. Not one of them spoke a word of English when they got here. So the very first thing they did was sign up for English as a second language. And they all went through training for speech so that they'd be able to communicate.
[00:22:37] And then, you know, it is so hard to learn a new language when you're 36 and 40. I can't even imagine. The kids did well, and kids usually do do well, but Linka and Teco, it took them a while to really understand the English language. But by the time I met them, and that was seven years later, they were great. I mean, they had their accent, but we conversed without any issue whatsoever at all. So I commend them for that.
[00:23:10] The kids, you would never know they were completely fluent. They still have a little bit of an accent, but you wouldn't even think anything of it if you knew them.
[00:23:22] They always say, get your kids into a second language early on, and it's because you learn it so much quicker. My daughters are adopted from Romania, and they came here when they were seven and nine, and they learned English very quickly. And now my oldest daughter is also fluent in Spanish, which is similar to Romanian. She doesn't speak Romanian fluently, but she does understand it.
[00:23:53] So that says a lot about being at a young age and being able to pick up those languages like that. Younger one knows some Romanian, and you would never even know she came from Romania. I mean, she. She sounds just like me. It's unbelievable, really.
[00:24:14] But anyhow, so the next big step was, what were they going to do to support themselves? Well, Teco was so handy at everything. He can build anything. He was mechanically inclined. He knew everything about boiling parts, about furnaces, about electricians.
[00:24:37] He just could do anything. And he had a friend that was able to introduce him to a director that was working for Portland public housing, and he heard about what Tetco could do, and he's like, I want to hire you. So he hired him as the head of the maintenance department for all of the public housing in Portland, Maine. And he did a great job, and he worked there for a long time. He worked there until he retired, which I think was in 2010 that he retired. So he worked for 20 years for them, and he did a great job, and they absolutely loved him.
[00:25:24] In the meantime, Linka decided, well, here's my opportunity. I can actually look into doing something healthcare related. So she went back to school to become a certified nursing assistant, and that's how I met her at the hospital.
[00:25:41] I worked with her for a long time as a nursing assistant. And then Maine Medical center decided in 2002 that they wanted to give out a scholarship for one of the nursing assistants to become an RN, a registered nurse. And they were going to pay for an associate degree program for a nursing assistant.
[00:26:10] So this was at a time before we started really looking at a level of education in nursing. Now, most hospitals want nurses to have their bachelor's degree if they're going to work in acute care.
[00:26:27] But there's still several areas, like a nursing home or office practice, where an associate degree is perfect, appropriate.
[00:26:36] But at that time, we weren't there yet. So we were just trying to get more nurses, and we thought it would be a good way to give back to the nurses aides that had been helping us for years. So Linka was going to apply for that program to see if she could get the scholarship, and the scholarship was going to be for a full ride to nursing school.
[00:27:00] It was the day before the application was due, and she called me at home, and she was crying. I know why I'm laughing. She was crying. She was like, there's no way I'm going to be able to get this application in. And I go, oh, yes, yeah, you're getting that application. And I said, I think that's why I'm laughing. And that's why she called me. I was the manager at that time, and I said, linka, I'm going to help you write the letter. We're going to write a letter on why you think you should be chosen for this program.
[00:27:32] And then I called the director of the unit, and I called one of the regular charge nurses, and I asked each one of them if they would be willing to write a letter of recommendation, and both of them agreed that they would. And Linca completed her application, and we wrote the letter on why she should be the one chosen for the program.
[00:27:59] So we handed everything in on Monday, she handed it all in. She was kind of excited that she actually had gotten it done. And in two weeks, they called her and they said, you're the one. You're the winner of the program.
[00:28:16] So she was the one that was selected to get a full ride scholarship to an associate degree program to become a registered nurse.
[00:28:27] And she went down to part time and she went to school full time. And then she graduated in 2003 and took her boards, and she passed right away. And she was a registered nurse, and she got a great job at Maine Medical center. She actually left the oncology unit and went to a general medical floor, and she was really happy about that. And then she worked. She was able to work until she reached retired. So she worked for 16 years as a registered nurse, and it was wonderful to see both of them thriving and living the life that they wanted.
[00:29:15] In 2015, at the end of 2015, Teko got sick.
[00:29:23] He was over in Bulgaria. Linka had gone over to see him and she said, you're sick. I think you should come home. He didn't want to come home. He was enjoying his time over there. So she said, okay, I'm going to come back, but I want you to come home if you don't get better. He had gone to the doctor over there, and they had tried three different antibiotics.
[00:29:47] By the end of November, early December, Teko's brother had called her and said, he's really sick. I think he needs to come home. So she paid for his ticket and she got him to fly back to Portland. She took him in to see his primary care doctor, and he did an x ray on him and he told them that he had stage four lung cancer.
[00:30:17] That was just devastating news for all of us in my mind, and I know this is so terrible, but I couldn't help but think, did he, what happened when he was in prison? I mean, the conditions weren't great, you know, and then what about him working in that mine? I mean, there's plenty of people. He never smoked a day in his life. He ate so healthy, and he exercised every day. So it was just so hard to hear that he had lung cancer. I just couldn't shake the feeling that it had come from something that he had been subjected to while he was in Bulgaria.
[00:31:02] But I think that's just an oncology nurse talking, you know what I mean? Because I've known plenty of people that didn't smoke that get lung cancer. It just doesn't seem right. I don't even understand it.
[00:31:20] But nonetheless, he did get lung cancer. It was stage four.
[00:31:26] His son Anatoly was working in St. Louis at the time, and he was in a great research department, and he was able to connect his father with a fantastic physician there at George Washington University. And so they brought him there for a research study, and he did really well. He did well for the first year and a half, but then the cancer came back.
[00:31:58] And in 2019, January, Teko died. It was hard to take after everything he had been through.
[00:32:11] He turned 70 that year, and right after he turned 70 in January, he died at the end of the month.
[00:32:21] It was a big loss for all of us.
[00:32:24] It really was a big loss.
[00:32:29] Linka retired that same year. It had been just so much for everyone, and she decided it was time for her to rest now.
[00:32:40] And she still has a life, a lot of life left.
[00:32:45] She has her grandchildren that are around her, two beautiful granddaughters, and her daughter and son in law live close, and she has her grandson from her son, and they live in Maryland, but that gives her an opportunity to travel back and forth, so she's happy about that.
[00:33:08] And the most wonderful thing of all is she goes back to Bulgaria one or two times a year.
[00:33:18] So that's the incredible journey of my dear friend Linka and her wonderful family and her husband Teko.
[00:33:28] They are just incredible people, and it gave me great joy to tell the story.
[00:33:36] When I look back on Teco, I just can't help but think he was a man that knew how to say when he had had enough, right?
[00:33:47] He knew that he was not going to live a normal life after being in prison.
[00:33:53] He knew it was not going to work out for him there, and he was not going to be able to stay there. He had to think about his family.
[00:34:02] So he said, enough is enough. And he bravely entered the doors of the US embassy to look for a better life.
[00:34:12] He was brave.
[00:34:15] The other thing about both Teko and Linka is they kept moving forward.
[00:34:25] Not a lot of people keep moving forward in their life. They just don't. They get stalled or they get depressed. It takes someone of great character to continue to move forward.
[00:34:41] I hope this story is a really positive influence to you. And you think about it.
[00:34:48] I think about them all the time.
[00:34:52] One last thing. When I was working at Mercy Hospital in the education department, I had the opportunity to go for training with relationship based care.
[00:35:07] And relationship based care is a study of how to see people in a different light. You know, we all have people that we work with or are in our neighborhoods, perhaps, or someone that you have to deal with in the doctor's office that just maybe rubs you the wrong way or you think they might be rude. And what I learned with relationship based care is that everybody has a story, right? Everybody has one. And it's that story that predicts how they show up for their life. So if someone's kind of harsh when they're communicating with you, it may not have anything to do with you. It may have to do with that backstory that they have.
[00:35:59] When I think about Teko and Linka, I think about that backstory. That backstory is what made them who they were.
[00:36:09] I don't think relationship based care would encourage you to like everyone. We're not cut from that cloth where we're gonna always get along with everyone, or it's gonna be this perfect, harmonious continuation in life. That's really not true. But I think what it does do is it makes you realize that everyone has had something or gone through something, and maybe we just need to give everyone a break every once in a while. We don't always have to get all heated up over the way someone communicates to us, right?
[00:36:52] Thank you for joining my podcast today. I really hope you love the story as much as I love telling the story of Linka and Tekko.
[00:37:01] I'm planning on being back on milkweed and monarchs in eight to ten days with another great story.
[00:37:10] I would encourage you again to go on my website anytime you feel like you have a story you want to share or, you know, someone, that would be worth me talking about on my website.
[00:37:25] The more stories we can get out there and share with each other, the more we understand what a difference each one of us makes in our world. And I think that's the most important thing. So thank you very much.
