A few years ago, Tatiana’s mother and I were driving somewhere and she was trying to encourage me to have the family spend some time living in Ukraine.
Tatiana had been living in the United States for over a decade at that point and it was difficult for her mother who only got to see her daughter and grandchildren once or twice each year.
She also saw a life for us in Ukraine that we just could not see at the time.
So I responded to her with all of the seemingly obvious reasons why it would not work.
It would be disruptive to our work with TeenSHARP. It would be a setback for our careers. What would I do for work given that I didn’t speak Ukrainian or Russian?
It took a week away in the woods in 2018 reflecting and connecting as part of the Pahara NextGen fellowship for a big shift in my perspective.
I came back home to Tatiana and asked “what if we just made a move to Ukraine?”
There were obviously a ton of logistics to figure out but by asking “what if” we started to see a whole new set of possibilities and solutions.
It was still a bit scary but it felt refreshing and exciting. So we got to work thinking about how we could pull it off.
In ten days, we’ll be at the one year mark of our family living in Ukraine.
I pulled together some of our highlights from 2021 in the video below.
