Olga Tishkevich. Screenshot of the ONT video
MINSK, 29 July (BelTA) – Former head of a regional branch of the opposition “party” Narodnaya Gromada Olga Tishkevich told the ONT TV channel about her life and work in Poland after leaving Belarus, BelTA has learned.
In 2022 Olga Tishkevich moved to Poland to join her friend Natalya Popkova, an opposition activist from Brest. According to ONT, numerous administrative proceedings had been launched against Natalya Popkova for unauthorized pickets and rallies and for being in a public place while drunk. She was placed in a psychiatric hospital. In January 2018 she left for Poland. After leaving Belarus, she converted to Islam.
“She laid a rug for me and said that there was nowhere else to sleep. I had never been to Poland before, and I understood very little Polish after living among Russian-speaking people. She took me to grocery stores, to pharmacies. It was very stressful to find yourself a different environment,” admitted Olga Tishkevich.
According to the activist, while looking for a job, she came across a website through which Ukrainians get jobs. At first, she had to pack parcels. She had to work 20 hours day. “You work a certain amount of time (I think 12 hours), then get a nap for two hours and then go back to work. You get 600 euros for this. You get one day off, and only if you are lucky enough. I held out for a week and quitted,” said Olga Tishkevich.
After that she got a job as a housekeeper in a hotel. “It was very tough. You had only seven or eight minutes to clean a double room after some customer from the USA. I couldn't handle it. It took me half an hour, an hour to do this. I lasted for about a month and a half and got about 500 euros,” she noted.
Soon Natalya Popkova invited Olga Tishkevich to come to Vilnius to earn a living by painting wooden houses. “This work was not as hard as housekeeping, because in the hotel I was slave-driven all the time. They would yell at you while you were making the bed, but you didn't understand Polish and just smiled. There [in Lithuania] things were different. There were Russian-speaking people there. And if someone shouted at you, you understood what they said. The salary was initially 40 euros for 10 hours, then they gave a rise,” Olga Tishkevich stated.
Answering the question why extremist resources do not show the conditions in which the self-exiled opposition lives abroad, Olga Tishkevich noted that the information is carefully filtered. “Why don't they show that people live in hostels? They don't they show that very few can afford renting an apartment. They don't show that former journalists work in Biedronka,” said Olga Tishkevich.
She remarked that extremist mass media are silent about the fact that former opposition activist and propagandist Ilya Dobrotvor lives in a car. He went abroad with five children, he fell out with his wife over financial problems, and does not pay alimony. Ilya Dobrotvor works in Poland as a taxi driver and sleeps in a car.
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