A message from Ukraine about hope

The other day I received a note from a former student. She attended my classes in western Ukraine in 2004-2005. She was probably 16 years old at the time. She was the best student in my courses. Where many of her classmates were nervous about their English speaking ability, she never hesitated to offer answers and contribute to the class discussions.

After 18 years, one session stands out in my mind. In the spring of 2004 I was new at teaching, having been an attorney before entering the U.S. Peace Corps. Further, my ability to speak Ukrainian was limited, in part because of the totally foreign alphabet. Also, it was traditional in many Ukrainian classes for students to simply memorize material with little attention paid to understanding the material. So, there were days when it was a struggle for someone 59 years old to teach teenagers in a different culture.

One particular day the 10th graders had not prepared for class, demonstrated little interest in what I was trying to teach and were successful in frustrating me. My frustration became evident to the students and I expressed to them my disappointment and I dismissed them early. As I was packing my materials, to my surprise Tania (not her real name) emerged from the hallway. She apologized for the class behavior, not simply her own. And then she said: “I now know what you are trying to teach us. You are trying to teach us how to think.” So a young woman 40 or so years younger than the American, fluent in two languages, taught me what my real assignment was. That one sentence gave me the encouragement to keep trying.

Now married with a newborn, Tania is still in Europe but fears for Ukraine’s future. She expressed the need for the support of the international community and the prayers of all. She mourns the innocent lives lost.

She informs that her parents and siblings with their families have been evacuated to western Ukraine which she hopes will continue as a haven. As this is being written, of course, we do not know if it will.

We saw Tania once in a very brief chance encounter in the summer of 2007. A few emails since and that has been it. But that one sentence in 2004: “You are trying to teach us how to think” spoke not only to her ethics but clarified my mission there. It also spoke to the desire on the part of others whom we met along the way, including two former Soviet Army officers: to make a better life for themselves, to have honest elections, to grow as a nation from the decades of foreign abuse, to have a free press, to be able to interact with peaceful nations in a rough and tumble world. That is the difference between Ukraine and its neighbors to the north and east.