One Ukrainian teacher faced an odyssey after fleeing the invasion. She wound up in Oshkosh, teaching about the conflict.
OSHKOSH – Like many people relocating to the United States from a different country, Oksana Katsanivska made a tough choice to leave her home.
Katsanivska, 30, lived in a small town called Iziaslav, Ukraine, in the central part of the country — about 180 miles west of the capital Kyiv. She had a nice house with a big yard, lived near her parents, who helped raise her and her husband's two kids, and enjoyed a career teaching English as a private tutor and translating nonfiction books into Ukrainian.
Then, on Feb. 24, Russian troops invaded Ukraine, and Katsanivska said she began living in a state of "confusion."
Her husband, Ivan, left the country just a couple days before the invasion for work, leaving her alone with their children — a 2-year-old son, Matvii, and 10-month-old daughter, Nina.
"It was a little scary," Katsanivska said. "You did not know what to do."
After she initially hesitated, Katsanivska left Ukraine with her kids in March, with her husband meeting them at the Hungarian border. She and the children endured a 20-hour car journey lengthened by streams of people leaving and checkpoints by Ukrainian officials.
Their next stop was Italy, where Ivan was working. But then, a decades-old friendship resurfaced. Katsanivska got a call from a University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh professor that would upend her life again — this time for the better.
That call led to a job at the university and, with the support of her friend and others at UW-Oshkosh, she moved to the United States with her husband and kids in August.
Katsanivska is grateful for her long-ago connection that brought her to the Oshkosh community. The past eight months have been a roller coaster for her family, similar to many Ukrainians who are forging new lives in other countries.
Translation work led to a chance friendship with a UW-Oshkosh professor
While in high school, Katsanivska spent part of 2008-2009, her senior year, in an exchange program in New Brockton, Alabama — a town of 1,428 people.
She said it was a culture shock at first — from reading "Beowulf" in old English during her first English class to encountering the area's huge hunting culture — but she ended up enjoying her time and, especially, American cuisine like barbecue and Thanksgiving stuffing.
She returned home and attended Chernivtsi University in Western Ukraine, where she studied in English and Ukrainian translation. After graduating, she wanted to travel and learn another language so she moved to a small town in Northern Italy, where she taught English to kindergartners and worked with teenagers at a community center.
When she returned to her home country, Katsanivska began working as a translator of nonfiction books — including the best-selling book "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall — as well as a private tutor for English lessons.
Katsanivska met Jordan Karsten, a professor and chair of the anthropology department at UW-Oshkosh, almost by accident about a decade ago. He was on an excavation trip for research of the Verteba cave in Western Ukraine. At first, Karsten was working with Katsanivska's boyfriend at the time, but one day she took her boyfriend's place at a dig.
Karsten said that Katsanivska quickly became "a part of the group," helping translate as well as pitching in for the dirty work — literally "carrying buckets of dirt" from the site.
Despite the "bats flying around her head," Katsanivska enjoyed her work in the caves and remained friends with the UW-Oshkosh professor.
That friendship was part of how Katsanivska found her way to Oshkosh once she fled Ukraine.
When war came to her country, Katsanivska and her family faced heartbreaking choices
On Feb. 24, Russian leader Vladimir Putin launched what he called a "special military action" against Ukraine, and Russian troops began invading the eastern part of the country.
Since the invasion, the entire country has been in upheaval as Ukrainian forces fight Russian troops to protect their homeland. More than 7.5 million people are estimated to have fled the country, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
When troops crossed the border in February, Katsanivska said she at first didn't want to leave Ukraine. Her husband had left for Italy a couple days before for work, and she said she was worried about leaving, in part because it was hard to imagine traveling with her small kids.
There were long lines of people waiting to cross the border into other countries to escape. Katsanivksa said she had family who waited for two days to cross after fleeing when their hometowns were attacked.
Some things she remembered clearly: The TV being on 24/7 to follow the news, feeling scared for her young kids, having contact with her husband, wondering what to do. But a lot of that time escapes her memories.
"Everything else is a fog," Katsanivska said.
One of the biggest worries was the air raid siren.
At first, she had to persuade her children to come down to the basement because normally they weren't allowed down there. So, she brought down toys for them.
"The first night (of the air raid sirens), my son was freaking out and could not understand what was going on," Katsanivska said. "It was not a good feeling; it’s the feeling of not being able to help your kids."
Then Katsanivska worried about what would happen if there was an attack and the sirens blared in the middle of the night.
"I didn’t want to wake them up because they would be scared, so we just made our beds down (in the basement)," Katsanivska said.
After a couple weeks, she said, her husband persuaded her to go to Sardinia, an island off the coast of Italy. Ivan had family working there, and he used to live there.
As she and her two kids were packing, she told Matvii he could pack only a backpack of his favorite things. At first, he took the backpack and filled it with his toys. But then, he took out some of his toys to make room for books and toys for his little sister.
Katsanivska said that moment was the "most heartbreaking."
"Why does he have to leave everything he loves here, from toys to his grandparents? Why can we not go home?" Katsanivska said. "That's the hardest thing. I can't give him an answer."
Her parents drove her and her kids to the Hungarian border.
Katsanivska and her children were reunited with her husband and then made their way to Sardinia at the start of March. Her travels were not yet over.
A decade-long friendship brings Katsanivska some 'good news'
Although her family now had a place to stay and a support system, Katsanivska just felt like she was "waiting for good news" that she could go home.
Katsanivska tried to take her and her kids' minds off the situation by taking them to the beach to distract them. At that point, she had been talking with Karsten, who realized his friend's background in linguistics meant she could be a good person to work in his department.
He asked her if she wanted to teach. She accepted, thinking it would be online classes. Then she got an unexpected call.
"He said 'We have it settled! We’ll try and get you here!,'" Katsanivska said.
Karsten said the faculty came up with four classes — Russo-Ukrainian Conflict, Food Anthropology, Comparative Linguistics and Modern Ukrainian Literature — that she could teach. The university could get her a visa and get her family to the United States.
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Katsanivska accepted and began the work to get all the family's visas ready.
She took multiple trips on an overnight ferry to the nearest U.S. consulate in Florence with her two kids. It was exhausting, but, she said, "If we can do that, we'll survive the flight (to the U.S.) for sure."
Once the visas were sorted, her family had two days to leave; otherwise, Katsanivska said the door would close on them. They arrived in the United States on Aug. 4, and she began teaching classes at UW-Oshkosh on Sept. 7.
Now in Oshkosh, Katsanivska hopes to repay the community's kindness, return home
As Katsanivska, her husband and her children were preparing to come to the U.S., Karsten said the university and its community went into overdrive to help them feel welcome and have as "manageable" a transition as possible.
The university helped pay for flights, worked to ensure they could enter the country and found a place for them to stay, he said.
While Katsanivska knew there were people looking to support her move to Wisconsin, she was blown away when they first arrived in Oshkosh.
She had seen a university building's empty apartment through video calls with Karsten, but walking in in the middle of the night to a fully furnished apartment, made beds, flowers on a table and welcome baskets from the university bookstore was completely different. Katsanivska was "overwhelmed" from the welcome.
There were even toys for her children, which made them forget they were tired as they started jumping and dancing around their new apartment with excitement.
"It was like, oh my gosh, they do so much without even knowing us," Katsanivska said. "That is amazing."
Karsten said he sent an email to staff asking for donations of household items for the apartment and was overwhelmed by the response.
"It was nice to see the community here," he said. "It helped make it hopefully as easy a transition as it could be."
Katsanivska has a full plate teaching four classes, but she called the discussion class about Russo-Ukrainian conflict her favorite.
Katsanivska enjoys being on "equal terms" with the students, and she said her students have responded well to her class and firsthand account of a current event.
"It’s the first time their class has been so connected to the reality," she said.
While Karsten's first hope was to help his friend, he said the university is lucky to have Katsanivska's perspective in their classroom, and it's a "great opportunity for UWO students."
Katsanivska said she has enjoyed Oshkosh — even the colder weather, which reminds her of Ukraine — and the friendly people in Wisconsin, but she of course hopes to return home.
Working at UW-Oshkosh has helped her mental state instead of waiting around for "good news." While she is still hoping the war ends soon and there is a chance of returning, she knows there is a "temporary timeline" that gives her less of a sense of limbo.
She is in touch with her family, and her parents are taking care of their house and dog until she can return. Katsanivska said it can be more stressful being abroad because you depend only on news and calls from family and friends about the situation.
And while she hopes to return to her life in Ukraine, she is making the best of her current adopted home of Wisconsin.
"What I'm trying to do here is repay the university for everything they’ve done for me," Katsanivska said.
Contact Bremen Keasey at 920-570-5614 or bkeasey@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Keasinho.
This article originally appeared on Oshkosh Northwestern: Woman who fled Ukraine after invasion finds work, solace in Oshkosh
