Ukraine exchange student

 Anna cam to the high school where I taught for 25  years in 217.  She stayed with our friends John and Joanne  who had dairy farm/ Often on Saturday morning Mrs. T and I would meet them for breakfast at a café in a nearby small town. Anna smart beautiful and articulate in English charmed everyone.

  When the unprovoked attack by the Russians against the Ukraine first happened  Anna was in the Univerity at the capitol of  Kyiv. As the bombs grew closer she and many other students sheltered in the basement finally making Molotov cocktail bombs to hold off the Russian tanks. Finally after several weeks as her volunteer father fought as a soldier in the bombs grew closer and closer on I made a decision to leave Ukraine with her mother and younger brother. By train. They fled to the Czech Republic. There she once again she ended up living as a refugee in a farmstead much like her experience in Minnesota. They are now in a small town north of Bratislava, Slovakia Anna and her family have their own space, living on the second floor of the farmhouse and it's really quite wonderful she says there is also now a large population of displaced Ukrainians in the nearby village she noted that they had all gotten together to make Ukrainian Easter eggs and thought it was good for them all to connect talk and do something positive together

   Anna knows that one set of her grand parents lives in a village overrun by the Russians apparently according to her father their apartment is still standing, others are rubble.

Anna asked to say a big thank you to those dear people of Minnesota  who remembered her, and were praying and thinking of her, and her country she noted it. She noted it is an awesome thing to be cared for by people on the other side of the world an!!!Anna's final semester of college has started and will be entirely online. Her classmates are literally her classmates are literally scattered across Europe/ she never seems discouraged in spite of the Russians deliberately bombing civilians she wrote it's always been that way we have always been invaded, or to keep Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. That goes back a long time ago. We do have something everybody needs, the capacity to grow food Stalin said it, can be no Russia, without the food of the Ukraine. And why now? And now Putin wants   to the country of Russia into the Empire of Russia. And he turns the terrible methods of his idol, Stalin, from mass civilian murder, to the forced relocation of people to the north of Russia. Ukrainians have been through this all before.

One of the many things that I have learned and the word has learned is that nothing comes out of Moscow that should ever be believed. Words just by time for what is a really happening underneath was One again Anna reported  "everyone I met in America so kind that is why I do not despair. As to her future plans Anna said our next move will be back to Kyiv brave young brave brave young college student returns to her school hometown and country where men and women young and old are standing together to defend a nation and its democracy against authoritarianism 'because of the war in a faraway Ukraine has become personal because of Anna. But............There is something else in my own  country different in detail but very similar in potential   consequences A political party whose base cult like believes a lie that the recent presidential election was stolen. There was a attack on our national capitol     instigated and  the cult leader of former president. Policemen were murdered and a vice president and leader of the house were threatened to be killed. Democracy came very close to being over throat by a Dr. Goebbels Hitler's Minister of propaganda showed repeatedly that a bald live repeated often enough and loud enough can work to create a fascist totalitarian system