Their country is at war but they're supposed to be learning: How Ukrainian students in US are coping
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Loading... - Baniti Emad
- 01 Apr 2022
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Despite being thousands of miles away from the shelling in Ukraine, Marta Hulievska gets anxious when she hears loud sounds. The freshman at Dartmouth College is often thinking about her family who fled the Russian military, her dad who remains in their hometown, and when she'll be able to return home.
She's afraid to go to sleep and miss news about her family.
"You kind of enter like this alternative world where you're not in America and you're not in Ukraine, you're like somewhere in between," she said, describing her experience as "second-hand PTSD."
"And this just affects your mental health a lot."
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Hulievska, 19, has continued studying medieval history and creative writing while fundraising and organizing rallies with the newly formed Ukrainian Student Association at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. It has helped distract herself from constantly checking the news.
Meanwhile, her mother, sisters and grandmother were forced to flee to western Ukraine from Zaporizhzhia when Russian military forces took over Europe's largest nuclear plant. She worries about her father, who stayed behind and has to keep the lights off after dark to protect himself from Russian troops targeting civilian areas. She said he is often awoken by the sound of sirens summoning him to bomb shelters — sometimes up to three times a night.
'There's a lot of guilt involved too, you know. Why am I here in the safe place where they are not?" she said. "Sometimes, it's like one step away from despair."
Hulievska is one of hundreds of Ukrainian students living in the United States and anxiously awaiting news about friends and family who remain there amid the invasion. Read More...
