When the Heart Is Stronger Than Illness — Our Client Nikoletta's Story

Despite her serious illness, Nikoletta Burik radiates joy for life. Her presence is quiet, yet it leaves a lasting mark: she is one of those people who shape others' lives not through grand gestures, but through the small acts of everyday care. In January 2026, she moved into a newly renovated rental home of the MR Housing Fund in Tatabánya together with two adults and a high-school-age child, one of whom lives with Asperger's syndrome. Her family is one of seven successful applicants under our Supported Living and Participation (TÉR) program for people with disabilities and their relatives, and now has secure housing for at least ten years, on terms more favorable than the market rate.

Nikoletta spent nearly two decades working in a flower shop before deciding, midway through her life, to move into child protection and work with children facing difficult circumstances. She now works as a family support worker in Tatabánya, spending her days in one of the city's most disadvantaged neighborhoods, Hatos-telep, where dozens of families living in deep poverty are part of her daily routine. The work is often emotionally demanding — there have been hard days she could only get through by crying it out in her car before going home. Even so, Nikoletta chooses to focus on what makes the work meaningful: the fact that her presence matters. It matters when she convinces a teenager to finish all eight years of primary school.

It matters when she and her colleagues organize donation drives to bring food and clothing to those in need. And it matters in the openness with which she approaches the children. When needed, she'll even dress up for a carnival event herself — most recently as a wildcat, to the children's delight. The people she works with trust her. If a family comes home to find a loaf of bread left on their windowsill, they know she has been by — quietly, without any fuss. Deeply committed to her new profession, Nikoletta decided to earn a degree in it as well, and is now in her third year of social pedagogy studies at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church.

Alongside her family, her job, and her studies, Nikoletta also enjoys helping organize concerts, events, and festivals, most often taking on the task of fulfilling performers' requests. This is how she came to know, among others, violinist Zoltán Mága and singer György Korda — the latter once asked her to find him a beautiful bouquet of flowers late at night, on the spot, at the Majki Summer music and cultural festival in Majkpuszta. Nikoletta doesn't believe in "impossible," and she solved that one too — a story she still laughs about today.

Nikoletta lives with an incurable cerebral vascular condition, but far from draining her energy, it seems to fuel it. "Where so many mouths are already being fed, there's always room for one more bowl of soup," she says — which is why, at her children's request, she has repeatedly welcomed foreign exchange students into their home, caring for them like a second mother during their stay.

One Thai girl, Film, who spent four years with the family during high school, sprayed all her clothes with Nikoletta's perfume before flying home, so she could carry at least the scent of it back to her distant homeland. A Turkish boy, Anil, who lived with the family for a year, invited them all to his wedding and seated Nikoletta right next to his own mother at the reception. Manan, a well-off Indian exchange student who spent three weeks with the family, called Nikoletta when war broke out in Ukraine and asked them to move to India, to his family's palace, where they could all live in safety.

There is a piece of Nikoletta's enormous heart for everyone, but as she puts it, she receives just as much love in return. It was Manan who sparked her interest in Indian culture — an interest she pursued so deeply that she enrolled at Bhaktivedanta College, where she will soon graduate as a Vaishnava theologian.

Nikoletta and her three children previously lived in a privately rented apartment, but when the landlord decided to sell it, the family had to move. In the first round of the Supported Living and Participation (TÉR) program for people with disabilities, in autumn 2025 the family won the tenancy of a three-room MR Housing Fund apartment in Tatabánya — securing stable housing for ten years, at a rent below market rate.

The TÉR program is continuing: in its second round, applications for the tenancy of twenty apartments and houses across the country can be submitted until April 30, 2026. Given her own positive experience, Nikoletta is now spreading the word about the program among the Tatabánya families in her care. At the MR Housing Fund, our goal for 2026 is to support even more people facing difficult life circumstances in their everyday lives.