Danya
Back home in Mariupol, Ukraine, I lived with my mom, my dad, my brother, and my grandma. My dad is a sailor, so he goes away for six months and comes back for one or two. I had a turtle, Matilda, and a Yorkshire Terrier named Boomer.
On a school day, normally I would wake up around the same time as I do here in the United States. School started at about the same time. I would walk to my gymnasium, which is what we called our upper-level school. After school, I would come back, walk my dog, and go to extra classes like art, math, English, or Chinese. I came back around 7:00 or 8:00 pm and did my homework. I walked my dog twice a day. If it was too cold, I wouldn't go for a walk. Instead, I would just stay home and watch a couple of movies. It was a big hobby of mine when I had the time. In Mariupol, we had a big drama theater. There was a really cool square next to the drama theater. It was a big place for all the teenagers because they have cool green grass there. We would chill there, so it was fun.
I lived in a primarily Russian-speaking area of the country, so my mother language is Russian. I learned English before I learned Ukrainian. I started learning English when I was about four, but it was with flashcards and stuff like that. Then when I went to school, I started to learn Ukrainian. Ukrainians are forced to know both because at home you speak one, and at school, you speak the other. It's a really good thing that you know both languages because then you can understand any Slavic language. I wouldn't be able to speak those languages, but you can understand them. I started learning German in school in fifth grade. When I came to the States I started learning Spanish, and it was easy to pick it up since I knew a European language and English. During COVID, my dad convinced me to learn Chinese. It's very interesting with Chinese because I started noticing how language affects the way people think. The descriptive words are different, and the verbs differ depending on the way people live in a certain area. Language is my biggest passion, but I think it all ties down to people and how everyone interacts with one another.
I've wanted to come to America since I was pretty little because of the movies and how they portrayed the American Dream. My favorites were Legally Blonde and Mean Girls. It was really cool to see the way they portrayed life in the US and how it was different from Ukraine. In 2019, I found this program called FLEX - Future Leaders Exchange. It's primarily for students from post-USSR countries, designed after the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the USSR fell apart. The program is designed for Americans to have exposure to individuals from countries that were part of the USSR. It's easier to get rid of prejudices when you get mixed in with the youth of that country.
I chose to take the first exam, which was five hours away from my town. I took the bus with my mom. I passed, so the same day I took the second one. We had to wait for like six to eight weeks to take the third one. The test is not so much for English knowledge. Most of it is just leadership skills. We had written tests and verbal tests where you sit down with people and have a conversation, and then we had games. We got into a group of four or five, and then they gave us a task that we had to finish. Mine was a debate, and they picked sides for us.
Next, you're given this application about practically everything, from medical history to a letter to your future host family. We signed a ton of papers, and we waited almost six months from December to May. Normally people try two or three times, but I tried in eighth grade and I got in on the first try, and I'm one of the youngest ones. Then COVID hit in February of 2020 and my program got postponed for a year. I came here on August 27, 2021.
When I came, I was prepared for the worst because an exchange year is really a big bargain. You don’t get to choose where you go when it’s through the FLEX program. The local representatives look for people who are willing to host. I didn’t want to go to Alaska or Texas, but I came to Minnesota which has elements of both. Overall, the Midwest is a really good place to live for an exchange student because it's a big mix of everything.
I have a double placement with another exchange student, and normally they never get along. My host mother, Briana, went to this year's local representative and asked for two of the best girls. She got me and Dila, my exchange sister from Turkey. We became best friends, and it was really painful for her to go away at the end of the year. My host family is a really incredible family, and we have good host siblings. I have lots of friends, and this year our school had nine exchange students, so it was really fun. We had our little friend group.
Sometimes exchange students get bullied or are not welcomed. For me, everything worked out really well, and even though there were some hardships, they were easy to overcome. I didn't expect too much because I didn't want to get disappointed. I only got disappointed twice: on homecoming and prom. I expected so much more of it. Everyone hyped it up a lot.
I tried softball and basketball even though I'm not actually very sporty. I just tried them because it was very American. I like being a part of the team. Even though I didn't get to play a lot, it was still fun to participate in practices. For basketball, we went to a tournament in the Twin Cities, which was really fun. Back home, you get an education in school and nothing more. You have to find other ways to be involved in activities outside of school. Here, you can explore yourself more. All of the activities help people to find their passion.
It's been different, I guess, but I expected it to be that way because America is the land of freedom. You're free to choose whoever you want to be, whatever you want to do, whatever you want, but there's lots of social pressure here. Here, everyone knows each other. I feel like not so much back home, and not so much in the bigger cities.
American news stations mostly started reporting about Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February, but it actually started a long time before. Because we lived one hour away from the closest occupied area, we kind of got the taste of everything. We were occupied for a few hours in May of 2014, so we were brought up with a sense that something was coming. My brother is soon to be eight. He was born right when war started, so he's been a War Child since birth. Russia is a rotten place. They’ve never treated Ukrainians as people. They’re always trying to occupy someone and start another war. It was not news to me that something was coming because I always had to know where my documents were in case my family had to flee somewhere.
Before this wave of war started, during the first wave of war, my aunt moved to Crimea. She lives in occupied territory. I went to Crimea after it was occupied in 2016 and 2017, but that was my last time. We had to stand for 14 hours under barbed wire. They didn't treat people like people. In order to pass through the border between Ukraine and Russia, there's a four-mile walk, and you had to walk with all of your luggage. You had to walk to the Russian border, and then there were dogs checking the cars. It's a really bad situation to go through. That's why I'm never going back. I'm never going back there.
Everything was starting to build up again in October 2021. Everything became kind of concerning in January when there was a troop buildup. We thought that it was fine, that it was fake news. My mom said, "It's all good. It's going to go away. It's just Putin having fun." Then in February, it got quiet for a couple of days. I was scrolling through my Instagram, and I saw lots of posts about the fact that there were many troops built up like something was starting, something concerning.
Towards the end of February, I was telling them that it's not fun anymore, that I think they should go somewhere and pack their stuff. Then one day Dila was scrolling through Twitter and she said, "Don't you think your city is being attacked?" She showed me a video of a bomb flying, so I started calling everyone, but I couldn't get through to anyone because it was night. They started attacking at 4:00 am, and they attacked five major cities. All of them were big strategic points, and they said they were only attacking military objects, but then it turned into a civil attack.
Right now Putin is killing Ukrainians because they're Ukrainian, and people still aren’t convinced that it is a genocide and not simply a war. This is not a war because Ukrainian troops are not killing Russian civilians like Russian troops are doing to us. From what I know right now, over 22,000 people have died in Mariupol out of 500,000. Lots have left and lots more have probably died, but we just don't know because of the mass graves and the fact that Russian troops are tearing down all the signs from the graves. They're more difficult to count that way. They also have mobile crematoriums where they burn all the bodies. It's really difficult now to track everything down because of social media and fake news. I'm guessing that we'll never know what actually happened. My mom doesn't want to talk about it. She never brings the subject up.
Normally, I text my mom every day and call her every other day whenever I have a free spot where she's not sleeping and I'm not in school. It's really difficult because I’m done with school at 3:00 pm and then I have something after school like basketball, so I'm home around 6:00 pm when it's too late to call her. I either text her all day long or call her on the weekends, but when war struck, I was able to talk to her only for the first week of the war.
From February 24 to March 1, and then from March 1 up until she got out of Ukraine. They shut down almost everything, so there was no service, no electricity, no water, no gas. I still don't fully understand how that could happen, and it's really difficult for me to understand from a distance. Being in the United States while everything is happening is really strange. I feel really guilty for being here. I'm really glad that I was not there, but then at the same time, I feel a sense of guilt, and I’ve asked myself why my brother had to be there but not me. It's really difficult. If COVID hadn’t delayed my exchange year and I had come last year, I would have been back to Ukraine right when war hit. Everything worked out. The universe put me in the right spot.
I wish at some point people stopped asking me questions from the Ukrainian exchange student point of view. When I couldn't talk to my mom, everyone every day would come up to me and ask if I had talked to her. That was a difficult part. As an exchange student, it is really difficult to keep up with everything here when something is going on back home and people generally don't get that.
The other thing that I wish people knew about being an exchange student is that our life is not as good as it looks on Instagram posts and stuff like that. Even though we're acting like everything is okay, sometimes it's not okay. Sometimes you get so homesick that you don't even want to be here. When everything was happening, I was homesick, but now there’s no home. That type of stuff is really difficult to figure out when you're a teenager and you're left alone in a country.
It's difficult to keep your identity in America. I feel like it gets so washed away along with your traditions. It's really difficult to stay the way you were before America because it takes effort to convince people that your culture is important. I had a period when I just wanted to talk to people about what was happening back home, and then I was judged for it because people thought I was making being a refugee my personality or being an exchange student my personality, but that is part of who I am. It's really difficult to navigate through teenage life while struggling with all of that.
My family is in Turkey now. My dad came back from sailing. He was in Sri Lanka when everything started, and then he went to Turkey. Mom and brother went through Russia to Turkey. Some relatives met them in Russia, so we were lucky enough for them not to go through a Ukrainian camp. Russians have organized those camps, and they're basically slavery camps because they take away their passports and force them into labor. They were lucky enough to meet relatives and get out through the airport. I don't think they're going to settle down in Turkey fully, but they have a rented apartment there, so they're good for now. My grandma is still in Mariupol. She refused to leave.
Most of my friends have left. I have some friends in Estonia, Georgia, Italy, Germany, and lots of people are in Poland. Everyone was going either through Russia or through Poland to leave. They are just looking for better ways to live. In Poland and Georgia, even though people are alive, the conditions are so bad. There's no humanitarian help for them. There's human trafficking. Places might seem welcoming to Ukrainians, but it all comes down to luck and how much money you have.
I don't like the way other countries treat our country. I always think about if I were from France or Italy and how much different my life would be because even as an exchange student, no one is generally interested in you if you're from an unknown country. Some people don't even know where Ukraine is.
I understand that this is a bad thing, but at least now people know where I am, and people even know my city - that's a big thing. Mariupol is normally not the most outstanding city in Ukraine, but now people have heard of it.
I get my news from social media most of the time, and I’ve found people that I trust. Some of them are leaving, some of them are still staying, and some of them repost information from other people. It mostly comes from normal people, just people filming and explaining what's actually happening. Those stories come from people who went out somehow. I still don't know a lot, and we just guess most of the time.
I don't know how I feel about being called a refugee. I always watched lots of stuff connected to the war in Afghanistan, then Iraq. I know some stuff about the Somalian war. You always think it happens on a different continent with different people. I just don't understand how European countries are in a state of war because it never happens. We have rights, and we have some kind of protection. We have better politics. I just don't understand how Europe became so plotted against each other that a war is happening in what used to be a civilized country. It's really difficult to be called a refugee, especially when I was not there when the war started.
I'm definitely for Ukraine becoming a part of the European Union and NATO. I feel like it'll be a big push towards where our country has been leaning for years. I don't understand how we're still not. We have been independent for almost 31 years, and we still haven't gotten what we deserve. Eastern Europe is never going to be like Central Europe or South Europe or Scandinavian countries because we're not built like that. It's not in our DNA, and in Ukraine, we have this hard sense of freedom. It's all over, everywhere. Everything is connected to being free and liberated because we've always been enslaved by one country or another. No one recognizes my area of Ukraine, even in Ukraine, because we have more Russian roots. Everyone's wondering why we're still speaking Russian. It's my mother language - I cannot just cut it out of myself.
My status is really difficult for now. Technically, I'm not an exchange student anymore. If my Temporary Protected Status (TPS) gets renewed, I'm going to have a J-1 visa with TPS. If I go off the FLEX program, I can get my driver's license and start working. That would be convenient. For now, I don't even know if I'm a refugee or an exchange student, so there's kind of a gray area. Exchange students are a small part of the immigrant body, so no one really has all of the answers.
Even though I'm a sophomore, they're letting me pass junior year because of all the instability. I have lots of credits from back home because there were 16 subjects. I've had all of my subjects already, so I'm just going to do all college classes this year to prepare me for whatever is next. I'm going to graduate next year and then see what I should be doing.
I did a lot of fundraising after the war broke out. I made t-shirts, cookies, bracelets, prints, and paintings, and I sold candles that were donated to me. I visited area churches, where I gave presentations. That was where I raised most of my funds. Most of the funds went to missionaries in Ukraine who are taking in refugees and feeding people. Some of it went to an animal shelter that is trying to reunite people with their pets after fleeing, and some went to a family in Antalya, Turkey who are getting Russian Ukrainians resettled in a largely Russian-speaking neighborhood as they come into Turkey from Ukraine.
My biggest goal is to get a good education. I might take a gap year, but I don't know if it'll work out or not. I’m not sure what I want to study yet. I wanted to be a politician for the longest time - I wanted to be a diplomat. I might do something connected to foreign policy. I am also looking into opportunities in language studies. Maybe I’ll be an interpreter or study something connected to law because it deals with people. I like the humanities.
I don't know what continent I want to settle down on. I was thinking that if I stay here, I'll probably go to the West Coast, like Washington, Oregon, or North California. I might go and study in Europe. If I study in Europe, I'm going to study in a western European country, not an eastern European one. I'm probably never going to go back to Ukraine. I love my country, and I love my culture. I love the people in my country. I don't like my government, and I don't like the fact that Russia is next to me. It's always knocking on my door. I'm just not ready to deal with it for the rest of my life. I never felt like I was at home in my own country because life there is so much different from how I want to live.
It sounds like a great opportunity for me to go to western Europe because I would get to experience something new, but then even in the States, there's so much more to see and do. I realized that I don't really want to settle down.
I want to find people along the way that will get along with me. What I’ve figured out is that you'll always find good people everywhere. I’m taking everything step by step.
On a school day, normally I would wake up around the same time as I do here in the United States. School started at about the same time. I would walk to my gymnasium, which is what we called our upper-level school. After school, I would come back, walk my dog, and go to extra classes like art, math, English, or Chinese. I came back around 7:00 or 8:00 pm and did my homework. I walked my dog twice a day. If it was too cold, I wouldn't go for a walk. Instead, I would just stay home and watch a couple of movies. It was a big hobby of mine when I had the time. In Mariupol, we had a big drama theater. There was a really cool square next to the drama theater. It was a big place for all the teenagers because they have cool green grass there. We would chill there, so it was fun.
I lived in a primarily Russian-speaking area of the country, so my mother language is Russian. I learned English before I learned Ukrainian. I started learning English when I was about four, but it was with flashcards and stuff like that. Then when I went to school, I started to learn Ukrainian. Ukrainians are forced to know both because at home you speak one, and at school, you speak the other. It's a really good thing that you know both languages because then you can understand any Slavic language. I wouldn't be able to speak those languages, but you can understand them. I started learning German in school in fifth grade. When I came to the States I started learning Spanish, and it was easy to pick it up since I knew a European language and English. During COVID, my dad convinced me to learn Chinese. It's very interesting with Chinese because I started noticing how language affects the way people think. The descriptive words are different, and the verbs differ depending on the way people live in a certain area. Language is my biggest passion, but I think it all ties down to people and how everyone interacts with one another.
I've wanted to come to America since I was pretty little because of the movies and how they portrayed the American Dream. My favorites were Legally Blonde and Mean Girls. It was really cool to see the way they portrayed life in the US and how it was different from Ukraine. In 2019, I found this program called FLEX - Future Leaders Exchange. It's primarily for students from post-USSR countries, designed after the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the USSR fell apart. The program is designed for Americans to have exposure to individuals from countries that were part of the USSR. It's easier to get rid of prejudices when you get mixed in with the youth of that country.
I chose to take the first exam, which was five hours away from my town. I took the bus with my mom. I passed, so the same day I took the second one. We had to wait for like six to eight weeks to take the third one. The test is not so much for English knowledge. Most of it is just leadership skills. We had written tests and verbal tests where you sit down with people and have a conversation, and then we had games. We got into a group of four or five, and then they gave us a task that we had to finish. Mine was a debate, and they picked sides for us.
Next, you're given this application about practically everything, from medical history to a letter to your future host family. We signed a ton of papers, and we waited almost six months from December to May. Normally people try two or three times, but I tried in eighth grade and I got in on the first try, and I'm one of the youngest ones. Then COVID hit in February of 2020 and my program got postponed for a year. I came here on August 27, 2021.
When I came, I was prepared for the worst because an exchange year is really a big bargain. You don’t get to choose where you go when it’s through the FLEX program. The local representatives look for people who are willing to host. I didn’t want to go to Alaska or Texas, but I came to Minnesota which has elements of both. Overall, the Midwest is a really good place to live for an exchange student because it's a big mix of everything.
I have a double placement with another exchange student, and normally they never get along. My host mother, Briana, went to this year's local representative and asked for two of the best girls. She got me and Dila, my exchange sister from Turkey. We became best friends, and it was really painful for her to go away at the end of the year. My host family is a really incredible family, and we have good host siblings. I have lots of friends, and this year our school had nine exchange students, so it was really fun. We had our little friend group.
Sometimes exchange students get bullied or are not welcomed. For me, everything worked out really well, and even though there were some hardships, they were easy to overcome. I didn't expect too much because I didn't want to get disappointed. I only got disappointed twice: on homecoming and prom. I expected so much more of it. Everyone hyped it up a lot.
I tried softball and basketball even though I'm not actually very sporty. I just tried them because it was very American. I like being a part of the team. Even though I didn't get to play a lot, it was still fun to participate in practices. For basketball, we went to a tournament in the Twin Cities, which was really fun. Back home, you get an education in school and nothing more. You have to find other ways to be involved in activities outside of school. Here, you can explore yourself more. All of the activities help people to find their passion.
It's been different, I guess, but I expected it to be that way because America is the land of freedom. You're free to choose whoever you want to be, whatever you want to do, whatever you want, but there's lots of social pressure here. Here, everyone knows each other. I feel like not so much back home, and not so much in the bigger cities.
American news stations mostly started reporting about Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February, but it actually started a long time before. Because we lived one hour away from the closest occupied area, we kind of got the taste of everything. We were occupied for a few hours in May of 2014, so we were brought up with a sense that something was coming. My brother is soon to be eight. He was born right when war started, so he's been a War Child since birth. Russia is a rotten place. They’ve never treated Ukrainians as people. They’re always trying to occupy someone and start another war. It was not news to me that something was coming because I always had to know where my documents were in case my family had to flee somewhere.
Before this wave of war started, during the first wave of war, my aunt moved to Crimea. She lives in occupied territory. I went to Crimea after it was occupied in 2016 and 2017, but that was my last time. We had to stand for 14 hours under barbed wire. They didn't treat people like people. In order to pass through the border between Ukraine and Russia, there's a four-mile walk, and you had to walk with all of your luggage. You had to walk to the Russian border, and then there were dogs checking the cars. It's a really bad situation to go through. That's why I'm never going back. I'm never going back there.
Everything was starting to build up again in October 2021. Everything became kind of concerning in January when there was a troop buildup. We thought that it was fine, that it was fake news. My mom said, "It's all good. It's going to go away. It's just Putin having fun." Then in February, it got quiet for a couple of days. I was scrolling through my Instagram, and I saw lots of posts about the fact that there were many troops built up like something was starting, something concerning.
Towards the end of February, I was telling them that it's not fun anymore, that I think they should go somewhere and pack their stuff. Then one day Dila was scrolling through Twitter and she said, "Don't you think your city is being attacked?" She showed me a video of a bomb flying, so I started calling everyone, but I couldn't get through to anyone because it was night. They started attacking at 4:00 am, and they attacked five major cities. All of them were big strategic points, and they said they were only attacking military objects, but then it turned into a civil attack.
Right now Putin is killing Ukrainians because they're Ukrainian, and people still aren’t convinced that it is a genocide and not simply a war. This is not a war because Ukrainian troops are not killing Russian civilians like Russian troops are doing to us. From what I know right now, over 22,000 people have died in Mariupol out of 500,000. Lots have left and lots more have probably died, but we just don't know because of the mass graves and the fact that Russian troops are tearing down all the signs from the graves. They're more difficult to count that way. They also have mobile crematoriums where they burn all the bodies. It's really difficult now to track everything down because of social media and fake news. I'm guessing that we'll never know what actually happened. My mom doesn't want to talk about it. She never brings the subject up.
Normally, I text my mom every day and call her every other day whenever I have a free spot where she's not sleeping and I'm not in school. It's really difficult because I’m done with school at 3:00 pm and then I have something after school like basketball, so I'm home around 6:00 pm when it's too late to call her. I either text her all day long or call her on the weekends, but when war struck, I was able to talk to her only for the first week of the war.
From February 24 to March 1, and then from March 1 up until she got out of Ukraine. They shut down almost everything, so there was no service, no electricity, no water, no gas. I still don't fully understand how that could happen, and it's really difficult for me to understand from a distance. Being in the United States while everything is happening is really strange. I feel really guilty for being here. I'm really glad that I was not there, but then at the same time, I feel a sense of guilt, and I’ve asked myself why my brother had to be there but not me. It's really difficult. If COVID hadn’t delayed my exchange year and I had come last year, I would have been back to Ukraine right when war hit. Everything worked out. The universe put me in the right spot.
I wish at some point people stopped asking me questions from the Ukrainian exchange student point of view. When I couldn't talk to my mom, everyone every day would come up to me and ask if I had talked to her. That was a difficult part. As an exchange student, it is really difficult to keep up with everything here when something is going on back home and people generally don't get that.
The other thing that I wish people knew about being an exchange student is that our life is not as good as it looks on Instagram posts and stuff like that. Even though we're acting like everything is okay, sometimes it's not okay. Sometimes you get so homesick that you don't even want to be here. When everything was happening, I was homesick, but now there’s no home. That type of stuff is really difficult to figure out when you're a teenager and you're left alone in a country.
It's difficult to keep your identity in America. I feel like it gets so washed away along with your traditions. It's really difficult to stay the way you were before America because it takes effort to convince people that your culture is important. I had a period when I just wanted to talk to people about what was happening back home, and then I was judged for it because people thought I was making being a refugee my personality or being an exchange student my personality, but that is part of who I am. It's really difficult to navigate through teenage life while struggling with all of that.
My family is in Turkey now. My dad came back from sailing. He was in Sri Lanka when everything started, and then he went to Turkey. Mom and brother went through Russia to Turkey. Some relatives met them in Russia, so we were lucky enough for them not to go through a Ukrainian camp. Russians have organized those camps, and they're basically slavery camps because they take away their passports and force them into labor. They were lucky enough to meet relatives and get out through the airport. I don't think they're going to settle down in Turkey fully, but they have a rented apartment there, so they're good for now. My grandma is still in Mariupol. She refused to leave.
Most of my friends have left. I have some friends in Estonia, Georgia, Italy, Germany, and lots of people are in Poland. Everyone was going either through Russia or through Poland to leave. They are just looking for better ways to live. In Poland and Georgia, even though people are alive, the conditions are so bad. There's no humanitarian help for them. There's human trafficking. Places might seem welcoming to Ukrainians, but it all comes down to luck and how much money you have.
I don't like the way other countries treat our country. I always think about if I were from France or Italy and how much different my life would be because even as an exchange student, no one is generally interested in you if you're from an unknown country. Some people don't even know where Ukraine is.
I understand that this is a bad thing, but at least now people know where I am, and people even know my city - that's a big thing. Mariupol is normally not the most outstanding city in Ukraine, but now people have heard of it.
I get my news from social media most of the time, and I’ve found people that I trust. Some of them are leaving, some of them are still staying, and some of them repost information from other people. It mostly comes from normal people, just people filming and explaining what's actually happening. Those stories come from people who went out somehow. I still don't know a lot, and we just guess most of the time.
I don't know how I feel about being called a refugee. I always watched lots of stuff connected to the war in Afghanistan, then Iraq. I know some stuff about the Somalian war. You always think it happens on a different continent with different people. I just don't understand how European countries are in a state of war because it never happens. We have rights, and we have some kind of protection. We have better politics. I just don't understand how Europe became so plotted against each other that a war is happening in what used to be a civilized country. It's really difficult to be called a refugee, especially when I was not there when the war started.
I'm definitely for Ukraine becoming a part of the European Union and NATO. I feel like it'll be a big push towards where our country has been leaning for years. I don't understand how we're still not. We have been independent for almost 31 years, and we still haven't gotten what we deserve. Eastern Europe is never going to be like Central Europe or South Europe or Scandinavian countries because we're not built like that. It's not in our DNA, and in Ukraine, we have this hard sense of freedom. It's all over, everywhere. Everything is connected to being free and liberated because we've always been enslaved by one country or another. No one recognizes my area of Ukraine, even in Ukraine, because we have more Russian roots. Everyone's wondering why we're still speaking Russian. It's my mother language - I cannot just cut it out of myself.
My status is really difficult for now. Technically, I'm not an exchange student anymore. If my Temporary Protected Status (TPS) gets renewed, I'm going to have a J-1 visa with TPS. If I go off the FLEX program, I can get my driver's license and start working. That would be convenient. For now, I don't even know if I'm a refugee or an exchange student, so there's kind of a gray area. Exchange students are a small part of the immigrant body, so no one really has all of the answers.
Even though I'm a sophomore, they're letting me pass junior year because of all the instability. I have lots of credits from back home because there were 16 subjects. I've had all of my subjects already, so I'm just going to do all college classes this year to prepare me for whatever is next. I'm going to graduate next year and then see what I should be doing.
I did a lot of fundraising after the war broke out. I made t-shirts, cookies, bracelets, prints, and paintings, and I sold candles that were donated to me. I visited area churches, where I gave presentations. That was where I raised most of my funds. Most of the funds went to missionaries in Ukraine who are taking in refugees and feeding people. Some of it went to an animal shelter that is trying to reunite people with their pets after fleeing, and some went to a family in Antalya, Turkey who are getting Russian Ukrainians resettled in a largely Russian-speaking neighborhood as they come into Turkey from Ukraine.
My biggest goal is to get a good education. I might take a gap year, but I don't know if it'll work out or not. I’m not sure what I want to study yet. I wanted to be a politician for the longest time - I wanted to be a diplomat. I might do something connected to foreign policy. I am also looking into opportunities in language studies. Maybe I’ll be an interpreter or study something connected to law because it deals with people. I like the humanities.
I don't know what continent I want to settle down on. I was thinking that if I stay here, I'll probably go to the West Coast, like Washington, Oregon, or North California. I might go and study in Europe. If I study in Europe, I'm going to study in a western European country, not an eastern European one. I'm probably never going to go back to Ukraine. I love my country, and I love my culture. I love the people in my country. I don't like my government, and I don't like the fact that Russia is next to me. It's always knocking on my door. I'm just not ready to deal with it for the rest of my life. I never felt like I was at home in my own country because life there is so much different from how I want to live.
It sounds like a great opportunity for me to go to western Europe because I would get to experience something new, but then even in the States, there's so much more to see and do. I realized that I don't really want to settle down.
I want to find people along the way that will get along with me. What I’ve figured out is that you'll always find good people everywhere. I’m taking everything step by step.