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WINSTON-SALEM Brian Boyenger of Winston-Salem and Vika Aksonova of Ukraine want to get married.

The U.S. government wont let them not in the United States.

Boyenger said U.S. Embassy officials in Ukraine have not approved a request first made in August by his fiance for a visa to enter the United States.

Just as frustrating for Boyenger is that he does not know what hes up against. Embassy officials have not explained why they have neither approved nor denied the visa request. Rather, the case has been sent to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for further review.

So Boyenger, 29, a disabled Iraq War veteran, left his job stocking shelves at a local grocery store to move to Ukraine.

There, hell marry Aksonova, 28, and figure out the rest as it comes.

Boyenger said he would like to return to Winston-Salem with Aksonova. Living in the area are his relatives and some of hers, including her mother and sister. But there are no guarantees that their wish of living together, married, in the United States may ever happen. He knows that. Such are the vagaries of the U.S. immigration system.

If I have to, Ill stay there, Boyenger said.

How can you overcome their objections if you dont know what they are? Boyenger asked. Nobody talks about legal immigration, he said. We cant tell people, You have to follow the law to come here, and then make it so hard.

Boyenger and Aksonova have been in a relationship since August 2015 when Boyenger met Aksonovas sister at a concert in Raleigh.

They have spoken mostly online but met in person in January 2016. Aksonova liked how Boyenger treated her, she said in Russian this week during a phone interview, translated by her sister, Iryna Butsch, who lives in Kernersville.

Boyenger asked Aksonova to marry him April 10, 2016, in Kharkov, Ukraine. He proposed again that October in Paris, Boyenger said, because Im very traditional and felt it was best to do things the right way.

On a cold February day, Aksonova spent several hours at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev answering questions about their relationship. She had applied for a K-1 visa, the kind that is routinely conferred for a spouse or fiance.

Aksonova spoke with four embassy officials, one at a time, for more than four hours. She finally broke down crying when, during the final interview session, she was told that she had not provided sufficient proof of the relationship.

I felt devastated. Upset. Hungry. Thirsty. And I had to go to the bathroom, Aksonova said.

Boyengers efforts to get support from U.S. Sen. Richard Burr and U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx have been fruitless.

Aides for Burr and Foxx have told him that such applications are confidential, Boyenger said. Once the application file gets sent to U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, he added, there is little that can be done.

In an email exchange involving U.S. Embassy officials, provided to the Winston-Salem Journal, there is little information that Boyenger can use to prove that he in fact wants to marry Aksonova. From the Immigration Visa Unit of the U.S. Embassys Consular Section, an unidentified embassy official said their handling of the case has been correct.

The writer also said that there appeared to be differences between some of the information provided to you by Ms. Aksonova and her family members and the information that we collected in Ukraine, which included a visit by our staff to her place of residence.

Boyenger would like to know not because he thinks that Aksonova has misled him in some way but because he would like to correct the record.

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Ukrainian fiance highlights immigration barriers - Greensboro News & Record

This article first appeared on The Daily Signal.

Kiev, UkraineOn May 13, an artillery shell fired from within separatist-controlled territory landed in a residential neighborhood of Avdiivka, a front-line town in eastern Ukraine.

Three women and a man were standing outside the home where the shell hit. Elena Aslanova, Olga Kurochkina, Maria Dikaya, and Oleg Borisenko.

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They all died. Two children became orphans that day.

That same day, the Eurovision Song Contest finals were held in Kiev, Ukraines capital. Tourists from around the world had flocked to the city for the event. CNN published an article hailing Ukraine as Eastern Europes best-kept travel secret.

Two weeks later, Eurovision is over and the tourists are gone. But the war is still there, still killing people, as it has for more than three years.

On this day at the end of May, there is a collage of sights and sounds on the Maidan, Kievs central square and epicenter of the 2014 revolution, which overthrew the pro-Russian former president, Viktor Yanukovych.

The Trade Unions Building, which was torched during the revolution, flanks the Maidan. Now, the ruin is covered by an enormous fabric facade that bears the phrase, in English, Freedom is Our Religion.

On the open expanse of the square, fire jugglers thrill onlookers. Artists draw charcoal caricatures while their subjects giggle. Mustachioed Cossacks in vyshyvankas smash coins with wooden clubs to the delight of crowds. Cranky babushkas sell rolls of toilet paper adorned with the likeness of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Out of work actors in panda, zebra, and Minnie Mouse costumes pose for pictures with tourists, and then deftly ask for a few hryvnias.

A background din accompanies the carnival-like spectacle. A teenage guitar player performs rock songs by the Ukrainian band Okean Elzy. A nearby drummer bangs out solos over a backup track of American rock songs blasted from stereo speakers. At another spot by a fountain, a karaoke singer croons Come Undone by Duran Duran.

Ukrainian soldiers and tanks outside a building used as a base on February 2, 2017 in Avdiivka, Ukraine. Brendan Hoffman/Getty

Hardly a whisper of the war in the east, or the revolution that played out here on the Maidan three years ago.

And thats when you notice another sound. An ethereal chanting in a language you dont understand. But something about it catches your attention, as if it doesnt belong among the rest.

As you search for where the song is coming from, you pass by something youve never seen on the Maidan before. A white rectangular display. On it is a calendar for May with symbols for how many Ukrainian soldiers were killed or wounded on each day.

Almost every day leading up to this one is marked in some way.

In small clusters, pedestrians stand in silent revelry before this modest reminder of the war still raging in the east, six hours by train from Kiev, in which 10,000 people have already died, and more die almost every day.

They read the words on the display, written in both English and Ukrainian:

Every God-given day

Whether we work or study

Out on a date or go to the movies

Hike in the mountains or rest at the seaside

Has been paid with blood, with lives of Ukrainian servicemen.

2,600 Ukrainian soldiers have sacrificed their lives.

9,700 got wounded.

For the past three years

This is the price

We paid for every single day we lived in peace.

And then you see where that chanting was coming from.

At first you notice the crowd. A mix of soldiers in uniform and what looks like a normal sample of Ukrainian societyteenagers, millennials, those in early adulthood and middle age. And a few with gray hair.

The crowd seems to orbit around a still mass in the center. You walk closer to see what it is and then you see the casket with the dead soldier in it. His white face looks like a statue. His arms are folded over his heart and his body is covered in flowers.

Youre there to see this just as the two soldiers on either side lift up the casket and carry it down the stone steps of the Maidan to a waiting van.

An Orthodox Christian priest leads the chanting. He swings a metal orb that emits a cloud of incense. Another man carries a cross with the dead soldiers name on itVitalyi Zinoviyovych Muzhenko. He was 30 years old.

A young woman is crying. No, more than that, she is sobbing. Her chest heaving, she gasps for breath. Uncontrollable grief. Real heartbreak. Your eyes grow moist, too.

The soldiers are composed, but their faces are like stone and their eyes are focused on something that only those who know war could ever see. They are not here, but back there, in the war.

There are women in military uniform, too, and they stand at what looks like parade rest as the coffin is loaded into the van. Chests up, proudly, hands folded behind the back, feet planted wider than the shoulders. Their faces are as hardened and as composed as any mans. This war has required a mobilization of Ukrainian society that includes the countrys sons as well as its daughters.

You remember one 22-year-old soldier from your time on the front lines in Pisky. Her name was Julia. She went by the nom de guerre Black.

With her camouflage pants cut off at the knees, her silver and black metal earrings, and her long black hair pulled back into a ponytail, Julia raised her Kalashnikov to the ready and squared her shoulders to the sounds of a nearby gun battle, while you scrambled for cover.

Julia stood, stone faced and in the open, her cheek against the stock of her rifle, ready for battle, as the bullets popped and zipped overhead.

Courage, after all, has little to do with sex, or age. Strength is not made in the muscles, but in the minds ability to function in the face of fear, and in its ability to suffer.

Your ability to deal with war is as invisible and unpredictable as the biological ability of mountaineers to adapt to high altitude.

You either have it or you dont. And theres only one way to find out one way or the othera soldier has to experience war, just like a climber has to sip the thin air of a Himalayan peak, to find out whether or not you were born with the gift to survive on the edge.

Back on the Maidan, the crowd follows the casket as the four soldiers carry it down to the van. Loaded, the van doors shut. A few hugsan arm with a clinched fist wrapped around the back of a comrade. A few warrior handshakeshands clasping forearms.

Then, the van with the casket inside is gone. The funeral quickly scatters like a fog burning off, blending into the crowd on the Maidan.

Here in Kiev, the war means waving the flag. Its wearing blue and yellow plastic bracelets, banning Russian social media sites, and a sad shaking of the head at the news of death and destruction from the east. But thats not the real war.

If you want to see the real war, you should go to the military hospital on Lesi Ukrainky Boulevard. There, sitting on the benches in the shady, tree-lined courtyards, young men who are too young to buy a beer in America. Some are without the leg or the arm they lost in the war. Some are wounded in ways you cannot see.

You remember visiting your friend, Nemo, which is his nom de guerre, at that military hospital last year. He was shot during a battle outside of Luhansk, a separatist stronghold in the east. As he lay helpless from the bullet wound, a grenade had exploded nearby, spraying his body with shrapnel. He was in bad shape.

You remember Nemo from your time on the front lines as the strong, athletic soldier with short-cropped blond hair and tanned muscular body who built a gym in an abandoned garden where he would casually do sets of dips and pull-ups as the artillery rained down around him.

He was a recon soldier. And night after night, he slipped across no mans land. When you first met him, in the summer of 2015, he had already been at war for more than a year. When he wasnt working out, or on a mission, Nemo would tend to a strawberry garden. He wanted to remember the man he had been before the war, he told you.

You remember one night, when you were in bed in the basement of the abandoned house in which the Ukrainian soldiers took shelter from the rockets and the artillery. Your eyes were closed, but you werent asleep yet. Someone came in the room. It was Nemo. He put a blanket over you.

The bullet entered through Nemos hip, shattered his pelvis, traveled up through his abdomen, destroying his colon, intestines, and lodged in his liver. Now, a plastic bag collects his digestive waste.

You remember what he said to you at the hospital, when you put a hand on his pale, thin shoulder as he lay in the hospital bed, the nurses tending to his ruined body.

Droog, he said in Russian. Friend.

Nemo was wounded on July 18, 2016519 days after the Minsk II cease-fire went into effect.

You left the hospital that day, almost one year ago, and re-entered Kievs bustling city streets and you felt like the war was a secret inside of you. It still feels that way.

It was like that for you, too, coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, you remember.

Similarly, a generation of Ukrainian combat veterans is coming home from another endless war. They find a country that has largely moved on, even though the war isnt over yet.

The veterans are back living with their families, working at their old jobs, hanging out with their old friends. But in their minds, theyre still in the war. Even if they dont go to it anymore.

The artillery, the rockets, the snipers. The trenches, the minefields, the fortified, artillery-blasted villages along the front lines. Its all still there. So are the nights sleeping in the dirt, the same bland food over and over. The Arctic cold of winter on the Eurasian steppe, which broke the armies of Nazi Germany and Napoleon Bonaparte.

The spring thaw that turns the fields to mud and bogs down the tank treads and the tires. The stifling heat of summer, when soldiers wear flip-flops and shorts to combat and leave their sweaty body armor vests and helmets out to dry in the sun, leaving white streaks of salt on the Kevlar. And fall, when the trees lose their leaves and you have fewer places to hide from the Russian drones.

Its all still like that, out there in the east. The war goes on and on.

But Ukraine is not a country at war.

The war in Ukraine is confined to the 250 miles of front lines of the Donbas. Its effects are limited to a swath of territory that extends as far as the range of the weapons used. Less than an hours car ride from the trenches youd hardly know there was a war on.

The war is a destination. Once youre at it, youre in it.

A cease-fire, called Minsk II, was signed in February 2015, but the war never really ended. Of the wars overall death toll of 10,000 people, about a third have occurred since the cease-fire went into effect.

Today, the fighting has devolved into a static, long-range battle mainly fought from trenches and fortified outposts. Soldiers hardly ever see whom theyre shooting at. Most civilian casualties come from artillery and rocket shots, landmines, and IEDs (improvised explosive devices).

Some front-line towns like Marinka and Avdiivka have become otherworldly places where children go to school amid daily shelling and sniper shots. Where outdoor markets go on during the daylight hours, while at night people hunker down indoors like there is a monster on the loose that only comes out after dark.

For those living within its grasp, war has become a way of life. About 1.7 million Ukrainians have fled their homes due to fighting, becoming refugees in their own country. But for many Ukrainians living in the war zone, its not economically feasible to pack up and leave their homes. So, they choose to live amid the violence rather than become homeless and without work in some new town or city safely distant from the front lines.

Past the Maidan, you walk along Khreshchatyk, Kievs main boulevard, until you turn right onto Mykhaila Hrushevskoho Street at European Square and continue up to the intersection with Petrivska Alley.

Here, in 2014, lines of Berkut special police arranged like Greek hoplites beat their billy clubs against their metal shields as they advanced in lockstep toward the protesters. And when that didnt scatter the unyielding crowds, they opened fire with shotguns.

Today, there are white silhouettes of bodies painted on the ground where protesters died.

From the intersection you walk up a steep path into the wooded Mariyinsky Park. Then, off to your right, down a steep, tree-studded slope, you see a protest gathered in front of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine building.

The crowd of a few hundred people is massed in front of a line of concrete barriers behind which National Guard soldiers stand at the ready.

From your spot in the park, you stop, watch, and listen. Down below, someone on a megaphone is unleashing a diatribe about government pensions, corruption, and how the post-revolution government has been a disappointment.

Ukraine is not just fighting against Russia and its proxies in the Donbas, after all. There is another war for the countrys democratic future being fought in Kievs government halls.

In front of you stands an old man in a soldiers uniform. His left arm against a tree, his right hand is cocked on his hip.

Where is our democracy? the voice on the megaphone down below implores.

The old man slowly shakes his head. As if he has seen this all before.

Just a hundred meters away, along a brick path in the park, beside a small grassy space where children play and artists paint, buses with tinted windows are parked in a long line. Inside, police in riot gear sit waiting.

Nearby, at a Soviet-era outdoor stage, children sing with flower garlands in their hair. Proud parents in the bleachers hoot and holler and clap their hands like their team just won the Super Bowl.

Then, around a bend, you arrive at the plaza in front of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraines parliament. There is a protest about reforming customs laws. A protester bangs on a metal oil drum with a pair of wooden sticks. Behind him, a crowd waves blue and yellow flags.

You remember a protest at this same place in August 2015. You watched in horror as a protester, who was a veteran of the war, tossed a hand grenade at a police line in front of the parliament building, killing four National Guard troops.

The protest in 2015 was against a key condition of the cease-fire, which requires Ukraine to amend its constitution to decentralize government power away from Kiev. Moscow had a hand in drafting the cease-fires terms. Consequently, some Ukrainians, and many military veterans, consider following through on the decentralization measures to be a tacit capitulation to Russia. Especially because the war hasnt ended yet.

On this day, almost two years later, the crowd is much smaller than on that deadly day in 2015. Yet, once again, a metal barricade blocks the front of the Verkhovna Rada, behind which police officers and National Guard troops stand observing the crowd.

The man on the drum moves up just a few yards in front of the police line, as if tempting them. He bangs away, louder and louder. The police officers and troops stand firm, but do nothing to stop him. You watch for a while, and then you turn to leave.

Youre close to home and its getting late. You think, for a moment, that here in these quiet, tree-lined streets you can switch it all off and forget about the war until you return to it tomorrow, or the next day, when you choose to write about it again.

You stop to have a beer at your favorite caf around the corner from your apartment.

Inside, a young man in a military uniform, who looks like a boy to you, is sitting with a young woman. They are holding hands across the table. He is whispering to her. Tears run down her cheeks, which leave lines of streaked mascara.

The war touches life lightly, like a feather. You dont see it unless you look for it. But its always there.

Nolan Peterson, a former special operations pilot and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is The Daily Signals foreign correspondent based in Ukraine.

Read more from the original source:
Nolan Peterson: Ukraine's War Drags On, Out of Sight, Out of Mind - Newsweek

She became the mother of a healthy baby boy in January at a private clinic in Kiev using a process called pronuclear transfer that inserts the couple's genes into a donor's egg.

The procedure had been previously used to treat serious genetic diseases.

But doctor Valeriy Zukin become the first to use it to help two separate infertile couples have children in this way.

"There are patients whom we cannot help to have their own genetically-related baby unless we use this method," the 60-year-old told AFP at his Nadiya clinic.

Some two million women across the globe use in vitro fertilisation (IVF) to get pregnant every year.

But Zukin's treatment targets a tiny percentage of women whose embryos suffer from a disorder called embryo arrest that can either stunt development or kill them.

The difference in the method Zukin uses is that a woman's egg is first fertilised with her partner's sperm.

Then its nucleus is transferred to a donor's egg that has been stripped of its own nucleus.

The egg is thus almost entirely made up of genetic material from the couple -- plus a tiny amount (about 0.15 percent) from the female donor's DNA.

Need for caution

Not everyone however shares Zukin's enthusiasm.

Ukraine's conservative clerics argue that the technique breaches ethical norms.

"A child can only have two parents and the presence of a third person -- and especially the DNA of a third person -- is morally unacceptable," Father Feodosiy of the dominant Ukrainian Orthodox Church told AFP.

"It violates the sanctity of the marriage between woman and man."

Other religions have also weighed in on the issue with the Roman Catholic Church opposing the move because it would involve the destruction of human embryos as part of the process. The Church of England has said ethical concerns have not been sufficiently addressed.

Even some scientists have reservations.

They warn against jumping to early conclusions about how successful the method would be if it were to be applied to the general population.

"We cannot talk about its wide use yet," Larysa Tumanova, a professor at Kiev's Institute of Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, told AFP.

"First, we have to monitor the newborns' health until they turn at least three," she said.

Other experts point out that the "three-parent" technique -- a different form of which has also produced a baby in Mexico -- was initially being developed for those at very high risk of passing on serious genetic diseases.

Line of hopeful mums

Zukin strongly defends the work at his clinic.

"We explain the essence of the method to each patient," he says. "We report possible risks."

And there is currently a line of hopeful mothers ready to pay the 12,000 euros ($13,100) it takes to undergo the pronuclear transfer procedure.

"We have patients from Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Israel, Portugal and Brazil," he says.

Zukin thinks between 10,000 and 20,000 women a year could potentially be candidates for using the method to conceive -- a figure large enough to seek out a foreign partnership that could study how best to use this technique.

His health centre is now working with China's Shanghai University to determine the genetic causes of abnormalities in embryo development at an early stage.

"I hope that through joint efforts, we will be able to find in a more targeted way those whom this method will help," Zukin says.

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Ukraine doctor pioneering 'three-parent' babies | CTV News - CTV News

How does it happen that a child growing up in eastern Galicia among Ukrainians, Poles, Moldovans, Germans, Austrians, Jews, Roma, and Armenians dodges Nazi death squads and the Red Army, learns first-hand what it means to be a displaced person in occupied Austria, emigrates to the United States, completes university and seminary studies before being ordained a priest, writes a pioneering doctoral dissertation on ecumenism, joins a monastic order, is clandestinely ordained a bishop, has his episcopal ordination recognized by St. John Paul II, is created a cardinal by the same pope and at an age when many men begin to contemplate retirement, returns to his newly self-liberated homeland for the first time in a half-century and over the next two decades becomes the most widely respected and deeply beloved figure in the country?

To comprehend the extraordinary life of Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, who died on May 31 at age 84, is to trace the arc of the slow-motion martyrdom of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the mid 20th century and its resurrection in the 21st.

As the Catholic Church in Poland was the safe deposit box of national memory and identity during the 123 years when Poland disappeared from the map of Europe (having been vivisected by Russia, Austria, and Prussia in the Third Polish Partition of 1795), so the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) was one of the principal repositories of Ukrainian national identity and aspiration in the hard decades when Stalin first tried to starve Ukraine into submission and later used every tool at the disposal of a totalitarian state to destroy Ukraines language, culture, and self-awareness a project continued for more than four decades by Stalins successors. But an argument can be made that the achievement of the UGCC in Ukraine was even more remarkable than that of the Latin-rite Catholic Church in Poland.

For Polish Catholicism was very much a visible presence in Polands national life, both during the partitions that eradicated the country and, later, under both Nazi and Communist tyranny. The UGCC, however, did its most impressive work of preserving and developing national identity, culture, and morale during the four and a half decades when it was the worlds largest underground religious body a Church with no public presence whatsoever, thanks to a canonically illegal and coerced reunion with Russian Orthodoxy engineered in 1946 by the Soviet secret police and the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. And while the UGCC hung on by its collective fingernails between 1946 and 1991, conducting clandestine worship and education in the Ukrainian forests, Ukrainian Greek Catholic leaders like Lubomyr Husar, living in the West in Husars case, in New York, Washington, and other American locales, before redeploying to Rome laid the foundations for a revival of Greek Catholic life at a time that, for most of Husars adult life, seemed unimaginable: the time of a free Ukraine unshackled from the Soviet Union and freed to create its own destiny.

That hoped-for miracle of liberation took place in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, and since then, Greek Catholic life in Ukraine has flourished. Lubomyr Husar, a man of deep faith, would be the first to insist that that miraculous resurrection was a work of divine providence and grace. But as Cardinal Husar is laid to rest today in St. Georges Cathedral in Lviv, hundreds of thousands of his countrymen having paid him their last respects in the days since his death, credit should be given to this visionary man of wisdom who bridged numerous worlds Byzantine and Latin, Catholic and Orthodox, religious and secular, pre-modern and post-modern in a unique way.

It was Husar who staunchly supported the development of the Ukrainian Catholic University, the only Catholic institution of higher learning in the former Soviet space, which has become one of the premier universities in Ukraine in a mere two decades and a model for higher education unburdened by the intellectual corruptions of Homo Sovieticus. It was Husar who oversaw, as major-archbishop of Kyiv-Halych and head of the UGCC, an extraordinary expansion of the Greek Catholic priesthood, and saw to the reform of seminaries so that the clergy of an independent Ukraine would be better equipped to minister in a post-underground religious environment. It was Husar who welcomed John Paul II to Ukraine in 2001 in what was the first papal visit to a former Soviet republic a week-long pilgrimage that, against all odds and expectations, became a moment of ecumenical encounter between Greek Catholics and Ukrainian Orthodox.

And it was Husar who, in retirement, became a moral reference point for a society still deeply wounded by its Soviet past. In a country struggling to shed the bad habits of duplicity engrained during its Communist period, and in a political community whose debates are often more characterized by heat than by light, Lubomyr Husar became a kind of national patriarch: the voice of reason, moderation, and wise counsel amidst the cacophony of post-Communist politics. And during the Maidan revolution of dignity in 201314, a now-blind Cardinal Husar could be found on Kyivs Independence Square, in solidarity with his peoples hopes for a future beyond corruption, a future in which Ukraine would take its rightful place as an integral part of the West, bringing with it the riches of Byzantine spirituality and culture.

The UGCC is now led by Husars dynamic young successor, Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk which is another testimony to Husars leadership, for he raised up a generation of polyglot, intellectually well-prepared, and politically shrewd leaders such as Shevchuk and the president of the Ukrainian Catholic University, Bishop Borys Gudziak. Like Cardinal Husar, whom they revered, Shevchuk and Gudziak are men of God who are also playing an indispensable public role, now in a 21st-century Ukraine struggling to realize the bright promise of the Maidan Revolution while suffering under a Russian invasion that has cost over 10,000 lives and created more than a million and a half internally displaced persons. It was likely a sadness to Husar that the Vatican has never brought itself to use the words invasion and illegal annexation to describe the Russian occupation of Crimea, or the word war to describe what Russia is doing in eastern Ukraine. And it remains incomprehensible to many why Major-Archbishop Shevchuk, the leader of the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, has not received the cardinals red hat to which Lumomyr Husar brought such distinction.

Perhaps the great cardinals death will cause some rethinking in Rome of its latest Ostpolitik; that would be a fitting tribute to Cardinal Husar. But whatever happens along the Tiber, the remarkable life of Lubomyr Husar helped make it possible for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to thrive in an independent Ukraine. Freedom, Husar insisted, is the opportunity to do good. That, he did. May his memory be eternal.

READ MORE: A Ukrainian Christmas Bitter Harvest the Bitter Present in Ukraine Ukraine, 25 Years from Now

George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washingtons Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

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The Remarkable Life of Lubomyr Husar . . . - National Review

ORONOGO, Mo. When Sofiya Bezpala beat out thousands of other Ukrainian students to spend a school year in the United States, she faced not one but two culture shocks.

The first, of course, was leaving behind her eastern European roots to live as a stranger in a strange land.

The second was moving from a city of nearly 2 million people to a town with fewer than 2,500.

Sixteen-year-old Bezpala hails from Kharkiv. Her city, established more than 100 years before the United States was born, is home to 80 libraries, seven theaters and a half-dozen museums. Not to mention skyscrapers.

So when she came to spend nine months with her new host family Amy and Kurt Krtek and their children Eva and Adrian and they were driving home from the Joplin Regional Airport, they motored past a field of grazing cattle. Surprisingly, Bezpala wasnt shocked by their appearance.

Though Kharkiv is (a) big city, I live on the very edge, in the country, so Im used to seeing cows and farms, she said.

She was also a bit surprised and relieved to discover that Oronogo wasnt an isolated community.

The Joplin metro area, she realized, was one gigantic city with a daily population of nearly 210,000 people.

It felt more like home, Bezpala said.

Coming to America

Amy Krtek had always been interested in opening her home to a foreign exchange student. One of her good friends, Jill Hartgrave, had hosted students for the past four years.

When Krtek mentioned in passing how neat it would be to do something like that, Hartgrave turned to her and said, Well, how about now?

It was through this simple exchange of words that Bezpala and Krteks paths separated by 5,700 miles would eventually intertwine.

There are two types of foreign exchange students. A majority of them are traditional students their parents pay for them to travel to the U.S. But there are also scholarship students. A U.S.-funded program Future Leaders Exchange pays for these elite foreign students to spend an academic year inside a U.S. high school.

Half the world away, Bezpala was hoping to become a scholarship student. But competition for these spots can be mind-numbingly intense. Only one of 50 vying students are selected, graded in part by their knowledge of spoken and written English. They must also be paired with a host family in America. Without a willing host family, scholarship students stay put.

When Krtek found out through Hartgrave that 30 scholarship students had yet to find host families, she and her family decided to make the leap.

This just spoke to my heart, Krtek said. I saw Sofiyas name and felt she would fit perfectly with our family. (And) if it hadnt been for (Jill Hartgrave) telling me about this, we wouldnt have gotten Sofiya.

Inside the classroom of her small school in Kharkiv, Bezpala couldnt sit still, fidgeting with nervousness. Calls from Flex program officials to winning scholarship students in her hometown had begun the day before, on April 28. It was now the morning of April 29, 2016, and her phone remained silent.

I was shaking, she said, lifting her arms and rattling them around.

When her phone finally buzzed, and she saw the Flex number on the screen, she nearly swooned. I was like, Holy moly!

After the phone conversation, she burst into tears. Her classmates surrounded her, congratulating her.

I still have on my jeans a red dot where the (classroom) floor was just painted, Bezpala said. It was kind of awesome.

When she got home and told her parents the news, her mom also began crying, giving her hugs.

My dad didnt cry, but he was really happy, she said.

By mid-August, Bezpala had learned where she would be spending her year in America Southwest Missouri. She jumped online and absorbed everything she could about the area and her new school, Webb City High School. She looked up her host familys house via Google Maps, read up about her schools rich tradition in football, studied the mining history of Joplin, watched YouTube videos of the Joplin tornados destructive aftermath. She became a Jasper County expert overnight.

The night she found out who her host family would be, she waited anxiously for them to contact her.

I waited; waited for them for hours. I emailed them. I was so nervous. I was thinking, Why are they not responding to me? You have a new host daughter and youre not responding?

Mother Nature was to blame. While Bezpala worried inside her bedroom, the Krteks were sound asleep thousands of miles away. Bezpala had forgotten about the eight-hour time difference between the two countries.

We talked the very first time at 5:30 (that) morning, Krtek said with a laugh. It was very heartwarming. I could hear the excitement in her voice. She thanked me 1,000 times for opening our home to her.

One happy family

Sept. 8, 2016, was the day Bezpala arrived in Joplin following a 16-hour flight from Kiev.

That was the day, Krtek said, that our lives forever changed for the better.

There was no fear on Bezpalas part about her journey to Joplin.

I an 16 years old, she said. What would I be afraid of?

It didnt take long for Bezpala to adjust to life in Americas heartland, though some of the sights here took her by surprise. Her jaw dropped open the first time she stepped inside Joplins Target store. She discovered that the U.S. has a dizzying amount of great-tasting candy, almost too much to fully comprehend. She wanted pictures taken of her inside Mercy Hospital Joplin because nothing quite like it exists back home. She melted when she dined inside Joplins Del Rio Bordertown Cafe, falling in love with the cheesy spinach enchilada; Ukrainian food, she said, can be a bit bland by comparison. She also learned to love cold drinks; America loves iced teas and cola and coffees, something thats not common in Eurasian countries.

She immediately took to her new school in Webb City, she said.

Oh my gosh, I read all about it (before coming here) 12 championships, the Cardinals. Webb City is the best. I do love football. I still dont understand it I just know to cheer when I hear the word touchdown.

Her school back home is small, roughly 400 students, and it houses students kindergarten through 11th grade (there is no 12th grade in Ukraine). At WCHS, she was thrilled to find herself surrounded by students all her age.

There are no little kids walking around, she said.

During her first day of school, she was a bit worried about how she would be accepted. After all, shed seen the American movie Mean Girls. But none of the Webb City girls were mean to her. By her second day, she was surrounded by nearly a dozen girls at the lunch table. Friends for life is how she described them.

Bezpala finished her American school year with a 3.8 grade-point average; she had also volunteered 100 hours of service to her adopted community, including helping out the survivors of the Goodman tornado in McDonald County. She also gave eight presentations about her native land throughout the school year, including a demonstration on how to prepare her countrys native dish: borscht.

She was surprised by the lack of public transportation (Here in America, everybody has a car), and the only thing she truly feared during her time here was the weather tornados.

Everybody here says they are used to tornadoes. How can you be used to tornadoes? Im not really worried about thunderstorms, the thunder and lightning, but on TV, when the (tornado) warning, the sounds, the sirens ... Bezpala stopped and shivered.

Unlike most students, Bezpala does not intend to move and live in the States. She loves her land, and she wants to stay close to her parents she is an only child. She will likely go to college in neighboring Poland and wants to become a journalist. But she plans to visit America every chance she gets. Shes visited 11 states during her nine months (I still have 39 more to go!). She has already promised to attend the graduations of her new brother and sister, the siblings shes never had before Eva and Adrian.

Heading Home

Bezpala is headed back to her parents home in Kharkiv on Thursday.

She will never forget the opportunity given to her by the United States, she said:Your country gives money so we can come here, with (Americans) opening up their houses to us. What other country in the world does this but (the U.S.)? I really appreciate everything here. People are nice here. We are welcomed here.

A going-away celebration was held on May 28 by members of Krteks church, The Sanctuary of Joplin. There was a map of the world, and linking the USA to Ukraine was a chain of red hearts and the message: Together forever. Never apart. Maybe in distance but never at heart.

Since weve become connected, she definitely has become a part of our family, Krtek said. In fact, on her Facebook page, the dominant photo is a family picture that includes a smiling Bezpala. I think she hasnt just impacted us as a family, shes impacted all of our church members. Even though she is going home, there will always be a connection between us.

When asked by her Ukrainian friends if the experience was worth it, she throws up her hands.

Are you even asking me this? I got to spend an entire year in the U.S., and youre asking me if it was worth it? Bezpala said. Weird question. If you ask any person in the Ukraine, they would say yes!

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From Ukraine, with love: Eurasian teen spends a year studying at Webb City High School - Joplin Globe