When I was evacuated from Ukraine, I had 48 hours to pack and head to the airport. There was no time to say goodbye in person to most of the people I had become close to during my 20 months living there.
That was nearly two years ago, in March 2020. I had been serving as a Peace Corps Response Volunteer, teaching English as a foreign language and conducting professional development workshops with Ukrainian educators. I loved my work with students and teachers as well as the challenge and adventure of living abroad. Then the pandemic came. The Peace Corps abruptly suspended all its volunteer activities worldwide and arranged for more than 7,000 volunteers to leave their host countries.
Back in the States, I looked for ways to stay connected with my students. That spring, I worked with my primary Ukrainian teaching partner and an American social studies teacher to set up a virtual exchange between middle schoolers at my former school near Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and their peers at a public school in mid-coast Maine. Each week, participants responded to a prompt I gave them by making a short video and sharing it with the group.
This was an opportunity for my students to use their English, but even more importantly for the Ukrainian and American students to get to know each other. As it happened, the exchange allowed me to get to know my students in a way I hadn’t when I was in Ukraine — what brought them joy, what they struggled with, cared about and hoped for. I looked forward to clicking on their posts and seeing them appear each week on my computer screen. I was moved by their honesty and insight.
I learned that Tania’s favorite movie was Dead Poets Society; she showed us the notebook where she’d written quotes from the movie, complete with artistic lettering and sketches. That she wanted to visit Finland for the first time, in winter, and see the Northern Lights. That she missed her paternal grandparents, who lived far away and whom she hadn’t seen in more than a year, since before the pandemic. “It annoys me sometimes, very much, because I want to spend time with my grandfather. He likes an active way of life and I’m a little bit lazy sometimes, and he motivates me to walk. … And I really miss my grandmother’s food.”
I learned that Mark loved bograch, a meat soup that his family prepared in a cauldron over a fire for Christmas and other occasions. That he and his friends called their group “Criminals,” because during the pandemic lockdown the previous summer, they’d decided to go for a walk. “We couldn’t sit at home and just do nothing. So we go to the park and found this place” — and he showed us the empty stage where they enjoyed hanging out and playing games. In his ideal society, he said, everyone has the right to their own opinion, “but this opinion doesn’t have to hurt someone’s feelings or make someone angry. I want to say that racism, bullying, and other social problems in our world, won’t be able to exist.”
And I learned that if Vlada could have any superpower, it would be the ability to travel in time. Not to the future, because “life just wouldn’t be exciting if I knew everything,” but to the past. “Sometimes I make mistakes, and when I think about it, I just want to go back in time and prevent certain things from happening. Also, sometimes, looking at pictures that I took some years ago, I just want to go back in time and live that day again.” Such as a day from her vacation in Greece two years before. “I had so much fun, and it was the last time I actually went swimming in the sea because of the pandemic.”
I share their words here because the recent news coverage of Ukraine has focused on diplomats and foreign policy experts as world leaders try to prevent Russia from launching an attack. But I want you to hear from a few of the young people whose lives would be severely disrupted and potentially endangered by an invasion. That possibility is unthinkable to me, yet it seems increasingly likely.
We continued the virtual exchange through the end of the 2021 school year. This school year, the Ukrainian students and I have met monthly via Zoom. Our most recent meeting was last month, on Martin Luther King Day. We listened to Nina Simone sing I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free, and we talked about the song’s connection to Dr. King’s ideals and to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Within her Zoom rectangle, Masha moved to the song’s syncopated beat.
Unlike a pandemic, war is a preventable tragedy. So I call on Vladimir Putin and the Russian government to stand behind their claim that they have no intention of invading Ukraine and to reverse the military buildup that has left the country nearly surrounded. Because I want my students to be able to live freely and fully. To see the Northern Lights. To spend time with friends. To return again to the sea. To begin building that community where the problems of our world don’t exist.
Sonia Scherr, a former Valley News staff writer, works at a public school in central Vermont. She served as a Peace Corps Response Volunteer in Ukraine from 2018 to 2020; the views expressed here are her own.