If you haven’t heard, on February 24th Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, officially declared war on Ukraine, a peaceful, democratic country that has been trying to join NATO for more than eight years to put an end to Russia’s aggression. Bombs are being dropped on cities, airfields are being destroyed, innocent civilians are being killed, and millions are becoming refugees as they cross the borders of Ukraine’s neighboring countries. This conflict is horrific and all I can think about is my friend who lives in Ukraine. For her, I cannot be silent about what is happening in Ukraine.
In late 2021, I started volunteering for ENGin, a nonprofit that connects English speakers between the ages of 13 and 22 to students in Ukraine to help them improve their English and encourage connections across cultures. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting myself into when I interviewed to be a volunteer, despite the plethora of information they gave me about the program. Yet I wanted to learn about Ukrainian culture, meet new people my age, and help students with their English language skills.
I was paired with a University student in Kyiv, who I will not name for their safety, in December and we hit it off. We spent the first few weeks talking about the education system in the US and I got to learn a lot about the University system in Ukraine. More importantly, I got to know more about my friend, learning about her favorite places in Ukraine to visit, her family, why she chose to be a finance major. I got to hear about how her final exams were going at the beginning of some of our lessons while I was on winter break. We would exchange stories about the places we would go on vacation. One time, she even explained to me how to take a derivative better than my teachers in High School could!
She is one of the smartest, kindest, most caring people I have met and now her home is under attack, her life turned upside down along with it. There hasn’t been a day since this war started that I haven’t feared for her and her family’s lives. There hasn’t been a day when I haven’t thought about the fact that her home country, filled with strong-willed, brave people, was being invaded for no reason other than the fact that Putin, in his insatiable quest for power and land, wanted to. There hasn’t been a day I haven’t thought about the city she grew up in and went to school in being bombed, the city that she had told me so much about.
My friend does not deserve this. Her family doesn’t deserve this. No one deserves this. We need to spend more time acknowledging and talking about Putin’s war on Ukraine at Bryn Mawr College. We need to take care of and support the students at our school who are from Ukraine or have family in Ukraine. Outside of school, we must support our Ukrainian-American community as best we can because they are going through a lot. Listen to the stories of what these people are going through. All of these people need our support.
Please call and write to your Congressmen; ask them to do more to help Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees. Here’s a template from ENGin that you can use for drafting your emails or planning your calls. If you are able to, please donate. This article details some of the organizations you can give money to but I also suggest donating to Razom, a nonprofit that has a good track record of supporting Ukraine in various ways.
I stand with Ukraine so that my friend doesn’t lose her home. I stand with Ukraine because there are thousands of ENGin students, tens of thousands of students in her country, who are in the same situation as her. You need to stand with Ukraine, too.