A recent interview with Ms Klára Vítková-Rulíková on news server Ona.Dnes.cz about the family of Romani quintuplets has sparked a wave of passionate debate on the Czech internet. Vítková-Rulíková, the founder of the Club of Twins and Higher Multiples (Klubu dvojčat a vícerčat – KDV) discussed private family matters in that interview, among other things, accused them of wasting food, and said they were incapable of establishing a functioning system of care for their children, all of which culminated in her claim that without her direct aid, the family risked having their children taken away by the state.
The seriousness of these remarks made it necessary to contact those whom they concern, and news server Romea.cz reached out directly to the mother of the quintuplets, Alexandra Kiňová. We also invited Petra Dobiášová, a KDV training staffer who began visiting the family right after the quintuplets were born and who therefore knows their entire history from close proximity, to participate in the interview..
Ms Kiňová’s contributions to the conversation were rather infrequent. The interview, therefore, is primarily based on the interpretations and the testimony of Ms Dobiášová.
Petra Dobiášová studied teaching for nursery school and primary school and taught lower primary school for four years. She spent the next 11 years on maternity leave and has four children.
She is the co-founder of the Mothers for Children (Maminky dětem) civic association, which runs the Milovice Family Center (Rodinné centrum Milovice), where she has worked in various positions for eight years. She has also served as the chair of the local Commission on the Family, Health Care and Social Affairs in Milovice, where the quintuplets’ family lives.
Q: You originally did not want to respond to the interview with Ms Klára Vítková-Rulíková on news server Ona.Dnes.cz. In the end you agreed to participate here together with Ms Petra Dobiášová. What made you change your mind?
AK: I sincerely hope this interview will help clarify some untruths that appeared in the interview with Klára. At the same time, in the course of caring for the children I have not managed to write everyone back who sent us good wishes and nice letters – definitely not because I don’t appreciate them. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone once again very much, everyone for every little thing, because I never expected so much help. The things I have been given for the children – clothing, prams, toys – are unbelievable and I see this as proof that there are many good people in the world.
Q: The filming of the Czech Television documentary about the quintuplets began during your pregnancy. How did you agree to make it?
AK: Klára Vítková-Rulíková visited me in the maternity ward and offered to help me. Then she came up with the idea that it would be nice if the whole thing could be documented. It was her initiative. The crew came to visit me in the maternity ward – the original plan was that the filming would take place over the course of a couple of years, but ultimately it developed into the form it has now taken. I went into it to have a souvenir for the children. You yourselves have seen how it turned out. I won’t comment further. I might have more to say once the children are older and the situation has calmed down a little.
Q: The filming sparked a wave of interest in your family, but those were not always pleasant experiences. Mainly on the internet there were many hateful posts from people who don’t know you. Are you still getting both types of reactions today? The hateful and the supportive?
AK: Yes, that’s probably natural, probably all "celebrities" encounter this – of course I don’t consider myself one, and I am doing my best not to take any of that to heart. I don’t read anything about us online anymore. I am glad for the good people who undoubtedly are here and who have shown their goodness.
Q: Petra, how did you meet the quintuplets’ family?
PD: In September 2013 I brought them some children’s clothing that had been collected for the quintuplets. The children were just gorgeous and the atmosphere was full of love. During Sasha’s [Alexandra’s] pregnancy we at the Family Center had thought about how we might help. Sasha and Tonda lived then in a one-bedroom apartment, so getting a bigger one was the priority. Later it came to light that the family is legally entitled only to one state-paid caregiver, which is not enough for such a big family. We proposed the municipality finance a second caregiver from its own funds. The town initially agreed and the family was able to count on them from the beginning. Then the Family Center began to set up a collection of material aid for the family that continues to this day. During my part-time work at the Family Center I was offered the opportunity to help directly in the quintuplets’ family. That was how I met Sasha. On behalf of the Family Center I visited the quintuplets from the end of September until December 2013, every Friday for four hours. Here I must emphasize that I actually put myself forward for the job, nobody convinced me to do it. I wanted to help the family in their hard situation. It was evident that the care for the newborns was so demanding that it would be unamangeable with just one caregiver.
Q: Then you received an offer to work in the family of the quintuplets from the Club of Twins and Higher Multiples?
PD: In the interim, Klára Rulíková got money from a grant to employ someone who would help with the children above and beyond the caregiver services (which, according to law, had seemed all but impossible for the state to provide). Given that I already had a good experience with the family, I was hired by Ms Rulíková to work half-time starting on 1 October 2013. The family and I made an agreement about the kind of help it would be – they needed help most when no caregiver was there, i.e., between 19:00 and 21:00. During that time Sasha and Tonda were at home with the children completely by themselves. Their first son Tony was living at his grandmother’s so he could get to sleep undisturbed and get up in the morning for nursery school. We agreed that I would cover the gaps in the caregiver service or help Sasha to catch up on her sleep if the night before had been especially demanding.
Q: Did you and Klára Vítková-Rulíková know each other before then?
PD: Not personally. The family joining her Club of Twins and Higher Multiples was handled solely by telephone. I first saw Ms Rulíková about one week after I had already signed the contract with the Club. She de facto did not know whom she was employing. It was enough for her that a colleague had recommended me. I met her for the first time during a filming session for about five minutes, as can be seen in the documentary.
Q: Can you tell us what it was usually like in the quintuplets’ family then? With five infants it cannot have been easy. What was it like day-to-day in the beginning?
PD: Caring for the children was seriously demanding. They were fed every three hours. Between every feeding, Sasha had to pump her breast milk. The caregiver was not permitted to even prepare formula, Sasha prepared it. In between feedings the children would fall asleep and then wake up again, demanding attention, the number of diapers used daily was endless, as was the number of wet onesies, jumpers and cloth diapers to use during feeding. The caretaker was not permitted to turn on either the washer or drier even though we did five full loads of laundry a day. It took a minimum of 15 minutes to feed each infant. The caregiver could only change the child’s diaper under the supervision of a family member – they couldn’t touch them at all otherwise. It was impossible to take the children for a walk without the help of a man – the triplet stroller is too big to fit through the door, it has to be carried out, and five children in carrycots weigh a lot. The father would go to work, come home around 5 PM and take care of everyone until 1 AM. During the day Sasha stayed home with just one caregiver for the whole household and six children total who constantly needed care. Five-year-old Tony also required his parents’ attention. When I began there, I had to start doing the things the caregivers’ service couldn’t: Using the appliances, preparing formula, help sort the donated clothing, and mainly support Sasha.
Q: The parents probably didn’t get much sleep.
PD: That was completely obvious from the first moment I started there. Every night there were three or four feedings. Sasha pumped her milk, which always took a whole hour. Every feeding involved washing and sterilizing the bottles, which in and of itself takes 15 minutes. Then you have to start boiling the nursing water, which couldn’t come from the tap, but from barrels of water the family bought and that someone had to get into the house. Then you have to portion out the formula according to the rules – don’t forget, these were premature children. That was the least of it, though. Then there was the feeding, which involved re-swaddling them, each child drank for at least 15 – 20 minutes, was burped, and only then could we attempt to have them go to sleep. Multiply that whole process by that number of children. When I was there for my very first "night shift" it was a shock to me. Do you think it’s possible to put six children to sleep and have two hours of peace? Not on your life. That whole night I didn’t sit down for even two minutes. The children kept waking up during the preparations. Once two of them were awake, if it was even close to feeding time, I had to wake Sasha up whether she liked it or not, because otherwise there was the risk that all of them would be awake within a couple of minutes and the food wouldn’t be ready. Sasha would sleep, with breaks, for only three or four hours a night. If the children were peevish, she might never sleep. Tonda got up at 3:30 AM to go to work after three hours of sleep and came home around 5:00 PM. The director of the Family Center, Lída Šimková, and I both said that it wasn’t sustainable, that he would collapse.
Q: Who else worked in the quintuplets’ family?
PD: When I began in October 2013, it was obvious that two simultaneous caregivers would be needed, that one really wasn’t enough. The aim was to have two caregivers during the day and at least one at night. However, a kind of merry-go-round began – you can’t imagine. A new caregiver came every day. During one month I counted 20 different people! No one from the family was able to say anything about it: You either want their help, or if not, you’re out of luck. If you could have seen how the children responded! They were completely neurotic and constantly crying. To this day I do not understand how anyone could have allowed that to happen. Many caregivers quit on their own, many could not accept the children. We had to teach many of them basic things, every day. We had no overview of who was coming when or how long they would stay there. In October sometimes no one made it for nighttime service, the weekends were only partially covered, and later they weren’t covered at all. Every day you have strangers in your house about whom you know nothing, you must deal with them for 12 hours and entrust your children to them.
Q: Did you know how to address that?
PD: At the end of October I participated in a meeting at the Regional Authority. I wanted them to create a permanent team of caregivers, two during the day and at least one at night so Sasha could be given a schedule of services a week in advance and get information that concerned her in a timely fashion. Naturally I also wanted the family’s privacy respected! The caregivers were writing up notes that the mother was not permitted to see. To my proposal of creating a permanent team, they literally said to me at the meeting: "Forget about a permanent team." Eventually, however, in November a team of eight people did crystallize, we all sat down together, the caregivers with the children and the family, but that little window of peace only lasted three weeks. Then the caregivers’ service said it would modify the individual plan and various people began alternating there. In November my half-time presence was rounded out by Dáša, another field worker employed by KDV. I must say that her presence really was a great help to the family.
Q: Sasha’s state of health has not always been good during the past year and a half. It’s obvious in the documentary. What happened?
PD: Yes, four months after she gave birth the caregivers started not showing up. All it took was for that to happen twice, for there to be no caregiver service arranged, and Sasha began to have problems with painful inflammation of the breasts. She made it through the first bout of that illness, but not the second. In my opinion, it happened as a consequence of there not being enough people to step in for Sasha, to care for the children while they were being fed. It was not humanly possible for Sasha to do everything on time, so aspiration of the breast went by the wayside more than once and the inflammation began. Sasha had to be taken away by ambulance eventually during November and then had to stop nursing the children altogether.
Q: She was also fighting a hernia.
PD: At the beginning of 2014 the children got chicken pox, they were constantly awake, always crying, their whole little bodies were in pain. During the night I had to wake up not just Sasha but also Tonda. At that time he helped even more than usual and had to stay home on sick leave for a while because he works with food at his job. Then we found out that Sasha had a hernia. She was constantly carrying the children and her abdominal wall, after such a demanding birth, was greatly weakened. In February she had to be operated on. Even before then it was clear that picking up the children and carrying them was very painful for her. Without Tonda’s help we definitely would not have managed.
Q: Did the caregivers’ service provide more help during that crisis?
PD: On the contrary. The caregivers’ service at that time evidently felt that if Tonda was on sick leave and doing his best to fill in for Sasha in many respects after her operation, then the family didn’t need that much caregiver assistance. There is no other way I can explain the fact that the service began to gradually not send caregivers in that situation. A caregiver would come during the day, and then in the evening no one would come. At the meetings with the representatives of the service I constantly heard that since this was the Kiňová family, the grandmother should take care of them, Ms Kiňová’s brothers should get involved (who had never held an infant in their arms before), etc.
Q: Sasha’s health complications didn’t end there. Currently another operation awaits her. What does that mean for the family?
PD: Klára employed two new field workers. Both are named Jana, so we started calling one of them Big Jana and the other one Little Jana. In September Big Jana started working with the family and in October Little Jana started. Both of them help with the children. The family was assured that the children would be cared for not only when Sasha was supposed to undergo her operation at the end of November, but during the whole time of her convalescence, which is supposed to last at least until March 2015. Until then Sasha is not permitted to pick the children up. During 2015 she will have one more operation. Tonda’s dream came true and he was able to get back to work at least in October and for the start of November.
Q: Ms Vítková-Rulíková claims, in her interview, that she is very disappointed in the family and it has occurred to her that what she is disappointed by is basically a question of Romani mentality.
PD: I really do not have the feeling that it’s a question of "Romani mentality". They frequently asked me if it bothered me to work in a Romani family. They asked whether I had to clean house for them! I said: How do you mean, working in a Romani family? I am mainly working with quintuplets!
Q: The interview with Klára Rulíková makes it seem as if she was with the quintuplets on almost a daily basis.
PD: Not at all. When I was there, most of the time she only came with the camera crew. Do you know how many times I’ve seen her in my life? Given that she was my employer, we saw each other only a couple of times during the filming, and then one year later I arranged an hour-long meeting with her without any cameras or anyone else present.
Q: What about the family throwing away food, as she accused them of doing?
PD: In the beginning there was no time to cook, so the grandmother brought them meals. When Dáša started working there in November, Sasha had more time to cook. Today they cook daily. Most of the time the food is eaten immediately, the leftovers are refrigerated and anyone can warm them up later if they need to. There really is no risk of any large-scale waste in such a big family. Quite the opposite.
Q: Klára Vítková-Rulíková mentions throwing away food in the context of the kind of neglect that might potentially result in the children being removed by the state. She says it is Sasha who mainly has to change.
PD: Yes, she tried to get it into my head as well that I must "educate" Sasha. From the beginning Sasha was aware that there had to be a daily regime and that it had to be based on the infants’ needs. Once they mature to a certain developmental phase, you can start moving things around the way you need. She kept precise records about each individual child – when they had eaten, how many times they had evacuated, when they took which medicines, etc. She kept tabs, several times a day, of how each child was sleeping. Gradually she led the whole household toward teaching the children to eat and sleep during certain hours. Today the regime is firmly in place, everyone in the household, including the children, knows what awaits the family at what time. With such a large number of people it wouldn’t work otherwise.
Q: Another argument that appears in the interview with Ms Rulíková is that she is "well-known" to the social welfare department. She implies that some problems have occurred in the past. The response to that claim from the Labor and Social Affairs Minister was "There is no such problem with the family."
PD: There is not and never was. At the beginning of January I spoke with Ms Kuchařová of the Social Welfare Department in Lysá nad Labem, who has known the family for more than 20 years because Sasha’s mother came to her once when she needed material aid (clothing for the children, etc.) and advice on how to fill out the forms. Ms Kuchařová unequivocally confirmed that there had never been any problems with the family. It’s not surprising – as far as I know Sasha’s mother, she may be explosive at times, but she lives and breathes for her family and she puts the children above everything else.
Q: Klára Vítková-Rulíková says in her interview for Ona.Dnes.cz that many caregivers left because of the oppressive atmosphere in the family. What was your perception of the atmosphere?
PD: The family had absolutely no chance to choose a person to help them whom they themselves wanted. Imagine that you constantly have a new stranger in your home every single day. You have no privacy, sometimes the children are ill, and Sasha had her own medical problems. That is not a recipe for calm. By the spring of 2014, however, it was no longer as bad as it had been in October. Some of the caregivers were just wonderful and the family was very grateful for them. Nevertheless, sometimes someone would turn up there who had no business doing such work.
Q: Do you have in mind the incident that ended with a slap?
PD: Yes. A new caregiver was sent more or less straight from the labor office, she had been there just a couple of hours, and she let one of the children fall off a seat onto the ground. Sasha and the other caregiver had warned her more than once that the children already knew how to turn around and push themselves, that they needed to be watched. When they went to get everything ready to take a walk, the child fell. That lady left the child crying on the ground, she didn’t notice a thing. When the grandmother found out what had happened, she lost her temper. The other caregiver, who had been visiting the family from the beginning, said herself that she couldn’t believe it. Nonetheless, there was a real possibility that the same woman would be put back on duty with the family.
Q: So if a caregiver came there whom the family didn’t want, if they could tell she was completely inexperienced, it wasn’t possible to ask for a different one?
PD: It was not, the family had to suffer the person in their home and with their children. Sometimes you could tell the children themselves didn’t like a caregiver. They would be restless all day, they cried. Sasha and Tonda were not able to say that they did not want a particular woman in their home with their children. It would have caused an enormous problem with the caregivers’ service with respect to coverage. They would not have sent a replacement for the rejected caregiver, which means no one would have come at all. Many times some of the caregivers did not know what to do with the children. We had to monitor them and warn them to re-swaddle the children or do something else they had forgotten.
Q: What happened after the incident between the caregiver and the grandmother?
PD: For while, nothing, and then on 31 March 2014 they suddenly announced that the caregiver service in the form it had been provided up till then was now over and that caregivers would be coming there only to clean, as per the law, not to help with the children. Unfortunately, Dáša stopped working in mid-April for health reasons. By the end of April I was the only person helping the grandparents and parents with the children, and I was still only working half-time. The family had to fully fill in for everything else.
Q: Was the quintuplets’ family able to function without outside assistance?
PD: Between April and August it was proven that Sasha and Tonda, helped by the brother, grandfather and grandmother, could handle it. Caregivers came from the service for three hours every afternoon and for one hour in the evening to help with cleaning and mainly with ironing. To this day it works like this: The caregiver wipes things down in the kitchen, vacuums in the children’s room, washes the dishes, does the ironing, and if there is any time left, she might help, for example, cut up potatoes, but she is not permitted to cook. During that time I only went there twice a week during the night shift. Those were the only two nights during the week when Sasha and Tonda could get even a little bit of sleep. When I agreed with Sasha that I could have three weeks’ vacation in July, the family functioned just with a caregiver for cleaning all by themselves, and they did brilliantly. They put things in order, into a system, and had the opportunity to discover that with the aid of the grandmother, the family could handle caring for the quintuplets without any problem. In August I went to help them with their afternoon walks. I can say completely responsibly that compared to April, there was much more peace and quiet in the family than when one caregiver after another was visiting them, which caused unreal chaos and fear as to who would be with the children next. If Sasha hadn’t had her medical problems, the family would have been able to handle everything by themselves.
Q: What is your response to the rather frequent comparison of the quintuplets’ family to the way another family, one with quadruplets, has supposedly functioned?
PD: In September 2014 Tonda started going to work and Sasha was at home with six children and just one caregiver. I have heard that in the quadruplets’ family both the father and mother stayed home. They also had one caregiver, which seems like too little to me. Back then they permitted a state-supplied caregiver to work directly with the children. That father reportedly was also receiving the same salary as if he had been going to work. That system today, unfortunately, is legally no longer possible. Now, by law, the caregiver is permitted to help only with the household chores, not with the children. Fortunately in this case the caregivers’ service faced up to that problem and helped the quintuplets’ family until March 2014 with direct childcare as well. When they stopped providing that service to the family, Tonda was more or less forced, starting in April, to care for the children full-time, which meant he had to handle the situation at his work by juggling sick leave for the various illnesses of his children, of himself, and especially because of Sasha’s two hernia operations, and the income from sick leave is very low.
AK: As far as I know, the quadruplets’ family were given a single-family house, while we are leasing an apartment from the municipality – they didn’t ask us for a deposit, for which we were and are very grateful and we have thanked them publicly. We are and will always be grateful for everything, for every bit of aid. A firm in Kolín, for example, gave us prams – the lady came to visit us herself, she offered them to us herself, she was very pleasant and even asked me to pick a color, she even brought me one to see! That would never in a million years have occurred to me, I counted on using older prams, I was doing my best to be realistic. When that lady left, I was so moved that I wept. Then I heard that she had received threats, etc., for helping us, and I was terribly sorry. To this day we are in contact from time to time. Once more, I would like to take this opportunity to thank her, she gave me great hope back then.
Q: In the interview, Ms Vítková-Rulíková also mentioned disagreements regarding the transparent account set up for donations to the quintuplets under the rubric of the Club of Twins and Higher Multiples.
PD: In mid-December, a friend called Sasha to ask whether she agreed that Klára could pay the wages of the Club’s field workers from the transparent donation account. CZK 25 000 was disbursed from that account for their salaries. Klára did not say anything to anyone about this, she did not warn her employees or Sasha that there was a problem with money for salaries, she just asked Sasha if she could use money from that account. That behavior is incomprehensible to me. Sasha had no information from Klára about whether the money would be returned to the account or not.
Q: What does the family want to use the money from the transparent donation account for?
PD: The reason Sasha and the family had previously decided not to touch the money in that account was that they are completely aware that they will need that money much more in the future once the children enroll in nursery school, once they start going to primary school, once they need to pay for medicine, etc. I can compare their situation with what it costs for my family of four children, the costs have skyrocketed – I can imagine what six children will cost. In that decision I stand by Sasha, because there are enormous costs ahead of them.
Q: You mentioned that Ms Vítková-Rulíková has not extended your employment contract. Were you prepared for that?
PD: I was shocked. I had a contract until the end of 2014. If Klára didn’t want to employ me beyond that, then I presumed she would let me know ahead of time that my job was ending. She had extended my contract the previous year, and therefore I counted on her doing so for 2015. I attempted to reach her by phone and wrote her an e-mail asking what her plans were for me. On 2 January 2015 I came to work as usual.
Q: You were no longer employed then, though.
PD: That’s basically right. On 5 January my dismissal came out of nowhere. In addition to the fact that the interview with Klára came out on Ona.Dnes.Cz, she also wrote Sasha an e-mail saying that I had finished as of 31 December 2014 and that if she wanted me to keep working with the family, she must agree to the money for my salary coming from the transparent donation account, just as it had for the other field workers. One of them has a contract through August 2015 and the other has an open-ended contract.
Q: When did Ms Vítková-Rulíková contact you with that information?
PD: On Tuesday, 6 January 2015, Klára answered me, once again only by e-mail, saying that my job was over because Sasha did not want the Club’s field workers paid from the transparent account. As a parent myself I absolutely understand Sasha’s requirements, and for the Club to use that as an argument strikes me as outrageous.
Q: You don’t approve of how Ms Vítková-Rulíková proceeded, even if it means the family ending their collaboration with the Club?
PD: I know that Sasha herself would be very sorry if she had to end her collaboration with both of the other staffers, but to take more money out of the transparent account intended for the quintuplets could mean the money won’t be there at much more important future times. Currently more money has gone to the staffers’ salaries. Despite that, the other two employees to this day still do not know what the future holds for them, when and whether the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry will approve the Club’s requested grant for their salaries. I had the enormous good fortune to be able to reach an agreement with the director of the Family Center in Milovice at the last minute, which has employed me again through Mothers for Children so I can keep working with the quintuplets’ family. However, it is still a big question whether they will be able to raise funds for my salary.
Q: How do you explain the downturn in the relationship between Ms Kiňová and Ms Vítková-Rulíková?
PD: Sasha is grateful for the significant aid Klára provided, mainly at the beginning. No one from the quintuplets’ family would take that away from her, but how everything has gradually developed is sad. Some of the steps Klára has taken are incomprehensible from a humane perspective. I, Sasha, and everyone else in the family understand that helping the quintuplets is an enormous opportunity for Klára to publicize the activity of the Club of Twins and Higher Multiples. Media interest about the problems of such families, who are legislatively mis-served in all aspects, is very important. The law in its current form simply cannot cover the needs of families with triplets or higher multiples. If it cannot facilitate families to receive direct aid with childcare, just with household chores, then it would be fair for the state to guarantee to those organizations that do employ the necessary staff that they will cover their salaries according to the state’s salary schedule. To employ a staffer for triplets or higher multiples through the labor office as a kind of public benefit work that earns minimum wage is an extreme solution. This is not just about the quintuplets’ family, but also about other families with triplets or higher multiples, or families with various health disabilities, or families who have two sets of twins one after another, etc.
Q: What is your personal relationship basically like with the family after the year and a half you have spent with them?
PD: I’m a member of their family. I am Auntie Petra to the quintuplets and to Tony. I can’t imagine that our relationship would end just because the Club wouldn’t give me a new contract at the start of the year. I would stay in touch with them even if no one paid me. Anyone who has the opportunity to see how this family functions day to day has no doubt that the children are well cared for.
Editors’ Note: Currently communication with Ms Vítková-Rulíková remains sporadic and solely through e-mail, and money to pay her staffers currently continues to be drawn from the transparent donation account set up for the quintuplets.
