Two Ukrainian students came to Pensacola for school. Now they're raising support for home

Mariia Kulyk, 18, and Daria “Dosha” Meshcheriakova, 20, are each spending 40 hours a week this summer employed at the Chick-fil-A in the Pensacola mall.

But the young women spend much more time thinking about their families back home in their war-stricken native country than they do selling chicken sandwiches.

The two Ukrainian university students are part of a selective work-study program that affords European students an opportunity to visit, travel and make a little cash along the way in the United States between their schools’ spring and fall semesters.

As part of their time and experience in the U.S., the young woman have worked to raise resources and support for the people of Ukraine. Already they have successfully fundraised to help purchase insulin that is currently in transit to the Ukraine, where supplies of the medicine are running fatally low.

Concern for their homeland and their loved ones occupies their waking thoughts.

“I think that our biggest concern is just for our families. They are in a safer region, but still you never know,” said Meshcheriakova. “But looking at all the horrors that are happening right now in the eastern part, you think that it cannot get worse but it gets worse.”

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Their newest project is a GoFundMe page raising money for children and parents who have been displaced by the ongoing war. It can be found at https://bit.ly/3MS6Enr.

Next month, the Chick-fil-A located at Cordova Mall will donate 20% of all sales made between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. on July 19 and July 20 toward supporting the two Ukrainians’ families.

Meshcheriakova and Kulyk are both natives of Ukraine’s Poltava province, but attend Lithuania Christian College International University in Lithuania.

As some of the top students at the prestigious international university, they were awarded entrance early this year into Chick-fil-A’s work-study program before Russia launched its most recent invasion of the Ukraine.

“We are in the work and travel program. Work-travel programs are very famous not just in the Ukraine but all around Europe. It is just an opportunity for students to come to the U.S. for the summer and make money. Usually it is only the customer service fields,” Meshcheriakova explained.

“If it is the normal work and travel, you have to find a job yourself,” she continued. “But here Chick-fil-A people came to our university and picked the people they would like to see in their stores and made our lives much easier.”

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Traveling separately, they arrived in the U.S. in early May. However, both of their immediate families are still living in their respective cities.

Kulyk is from the Poltava province’s largest city and namesake. Meshcheriakova grew up in the Poltava province’s second-largest city, Kremenchuk.

The Poltava province is located in the central part of Ukraine and far enough away from the war’s easterly frontlines that the students describe the area as “relatively safe.”

“They both share guilt. I can say that just from my having watched them,” said Kathy Worley, Meshcheriakova’s host mother and the owner of the Cordova Mall Chick-fil-A store.

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“When they say that the places where they’re from are relatively safe,” she continued, “you can hear it in their voices — that guilt — that their areas are relatively safer than other parts of their country.”

But in a country plagued by war, Worley noted, safety is “relative.”

Before the war, both of Meshcheriakova’s parents worked at the Ukrtatnafta oil refinery plant.

“It was the only one left working. But not now, they have bombed it three times with the rockets,” Meshcheriakova said of the oil refinery.

Her parents had just finished their shifts at the refinery and left work about five minutes before the first missile attack struck the plant.

“They were trying to rebuild it. But they hit it a third time,” Meshcheriakova said about the refinery that had employed her parents. “It is a hard time now, because they are not sure what they are going to do. What is the sense of trying to build it if they are just going to hit it, bomb it, one more time?”

Kulyk’s family have their own close-calls and horror stories — stories that recently helped to motivate her father into joining the military.

When asked about what job her father had been assigned to as part of military service, Kulyk looked down at her knees and began to weep.

She didn’t know where her dad was or what he was doing in the war. As of Friday, Kulyk had not spoken her father in over a month.

“There is a strength in Ukrainians,” Worley said. “I have learned so much about them since they got here — their culture and who they are. They are strong.”

Kulyk left the room crying but returned a few minutes later, drying her eyes as she walked back to her seat.

“The first thing that most Ukrainians who are not in Ukraine experience is survivor’s guilt. You are not there, you cannot experience this and you are not a true Ukrainian because you cannot share this,” Kulyk said. “But then the realization comes.

“If I was there, the situation would be so much different because my parents and my family would be focused only on me, and they would be trying to get me out of this country and to save me,” she continued. “But in another county, I am safe. I am studying. I am fully protected and safe and they can focus on taking care of themselves.

“So they are not having to think about me. That is the point that I am holding on to, that I am happy that I am not there. So, I am not interrupting them from thinking about (themselves).”

Colin Warren-Hicks can be reached at colinwarrenhicks@pnj.com or 850-435-8680.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola mall Chick-Fil-A will donate sales to help Ukraine refugees