Despite her age and the war, Dominika Balaboyko works multiple jobs without days off. She is lively, energetic, and quick to laugh. Always dressed in jeans and sneakers, her long white hair tied in a ponytail, she looks youthful and full of life. She loves to read, knit and enjoys simple comforts, like drinking herbal tea. She does all her own home repairs – plastering, painting, fixing whatever needs fixing.

Dominika was born on May 26, 1936, in Chernivtsi, where she has spent her entire life working, caring, and persevering.

After completing seven years of school, at 17, she began weaving carpets at the Voskhod factory to support herself. She stayed for over thirty years. Later she found her way to the Chernivtsi Arts Center for Children and Youth, where she has worked ever since – both as a night watchwoman, and as a janitor, and always as the beating heart of the place. To everyone there, she is simply Aunt Dusya.

Once, when the Arts Center had no funds for repairs, Dominika climbed onto the roof herself to fix a broken downspout that was letting water seep into the building. She tied herself to the pipe and scaled the roof as people gathered below, astonished. She fixed it. She climbed back down. Just another day.

"I needed to hang a lampshade," she recalls with a laugh. "I asked a handyman how much he would charge. 'Two hundred hryvnias,' he said. I thought – I don't earn that much in a whole day! So I hung it myself. And that is how it is with everything."

But behind Dominika's extraordinary vitality lies a sorrow she carries quietly. Her husband died at just 37 from a heart defect, leaving her to raise two children alone. Today, both of those children are seriously ill – her 53-year-old son is battling stage-four cancer, and her 64-year-old daughter has breast cancer.

Work, for Dominika, is not just a livelihood. It is survival of a different kind.

"At work, I try to forget my grief," she says. "If I stayed at home, I think I would lose my mind."

In addition to the Arts Center, she cleans several restaurants to earn extra income – doing everything she can to support her sick children. Retirement has never been a concept she could imagine. "What would I do at home? Wash clothes, clean – and then what?"

Dominika believes the secret to her vitality is simple: "The main medicine for the body is constant movement. And you must be kind and never do harm to anyone." She often recalls her late mother's words: "If someone does you harm ten times, you should do good once."

People tell her: "Aunt Dusya, you are kind – that is why angels protect you and give you health."

It is hard to disagree.

Your support will help ease Dominika's burden – ensuring she and her family have access to food, essential medical care, and the basic necessities that her tireless work alone can no longer fully cover. She has spent a lifetime giving everything she has to others. Now it is our turn to stand with her.