August 24, 2026
Thirty-five years. Today, the twenty-fourth of August, 2026, Ukraine is independent. Not independent in hope, not independent on paper, not independent one day when the fighting stops. Independent today, thirty-five years after we said it out loud and every year since that we have refused to take it back.
I went into grade 3 that year. A new country started the same September I did, and neither of us knew what we were getting into. I did not understand then what had been handed to me. I understand now, because I have watched what it costs to keep.
Here is what I have learned about independence: no document holds it. People hold it. Which means the honest question on this day is not what happened in 1991. It is who was holding it yesterday.
I can answer that, because yesterday I was in Vancouver, and I watched them do it.
Flag Day, on the ferry
August 23 is the Day of the State Flag. The flag always comes one day ahead of the country it stands for.
I boarded the morning ferry with Paul. There was no room for the car, but there was room for foot passengers, and sometimes that is exactly the amount of luck a day needs. The ferry was full, because Vancouver had a great deal happening on the same Sunday: the PNE Fair, the Lions against Saskatchewan at BC Place, the Tempo against Las Vegas at Rogers Arena, the Day of the Dog in Yaletown, the Richmond Maritime Festival in its second day. Everybody was going somewhere. We were going to Sunset Beach.
Paul is two years into teaching with the Victoria School Board, crossing for the BC teachers conference. He helped me along the way more than once, the way good teachers do things, without making it a favour.
The Inukshuk, in the pouring rain
We had time, so we walked in Stanley Park. Joggers, cyclists, an easy friendliness in how people moved around each other, and Ukrainian carried past us on the path more than once. We walked on toward the beach.
Then Tanya called. Tanya and I started studying social work together, and she is one of those friends who simply stays. We had not connected in a few years. She said they were coming, and they came: Tanya, her Mama Pani Valentyna, Bruno, and Orysia, one of my very first social work teachers, the one who came to Lviv with my Canadian Mama to teach us.
Then it poured. No umbrella, and we walked anyway, Bruno leading, me hurrying to keep up in a downpour, soaked through and quietly happy in a way I had not felt for a long time. The rain stayed outside. We stood at the Inukshuk with the flag up, five of us and a dog, and had our picture taken in the wet.
They had to leave before the celebration began. One hour. Not enough, and we both know it, and that is its own kind of promise.
What a country looks like when it is being kept
Then Paul and I went to the celebration, and this is the part I want on the record.
Children playing Plast games on the grass while their parents listened to the speakers. Bandura and voices. Dance master classes and a performance. A fashion show. Food that tasted like somebody’s kitchen at home. Community organizations set up to find people who think as they do. Two languages on the microphone all afternoon, so no one at that beach was left outside the meaning. And at the end, the walk to the Burrard Bridge.
Somebody booked that. Somebody carried the tables. Somebody taught those children the games, and somebody stayed up making the food, and somebody stood out in the morning rain waiting for the site to be ready. That is not a party. That is a country being maintained by hand, ten thousand kilometres from its border, by people who could have spent Sunday at the PNE.
Independence is what those hands are for.
The people I met
I could not have met everyone who was there, and I will not pretend to a list of names I did not earn. These are the people I actually met and spoke with. I said to everyone that I would write about them. Here is me keeping my word.
Natalia Zastello, Artem, and their daughter
The best meat in the park, and it comes out of Zaporizhzhia. Natalia and her husband Artem stood behind a table of jerky, kolbasa, chicken and pork sausage, with their daughter in the family business, and they fed people all afternoon. Natalia calls it Mama’s fire smoke jerky, which tells you everything about where the recipe comes from. Some of it came home with me, to share with Mama, Oksana and Svitlana.
Pani Zoya and the ladies who sing
Ukrainian women from Kyiv and Cherkasy who want to be home. That is the plain fact of it. They want to be home, and they are here because their children are here, and they know it is not safe there. So they did what our people do. They formed a choir, and they sang.
I stood and listened to Ukrainian songs on a Vancouver beach, sung by women who would rather be singing them in their own kitchens. They have a director who holds them together. If you want to understand what keeps a culture alive at ten thousand kilometres, it is not a policy. It is a rehearsal schedule.
Venera Ibragimova and the theatre
Pani Svitlana kept introducing me to people, which is its own kind of community work, and one of them was Venera Ibragimova, who organized Ukrainian theatre here in Vancouver, the Salamandra Drama and Puppet Theatre.
From there I learned about the Berezil Theatre art festival, “The Garden of Ukrainian History,” on September 6 from 1 to 8 pm at London Heritage Farm, 6511 Duke Rd, Richmond. Exhibition, art installations, photo zones, performances, music, a kids’ show programme, a food and craft market. Everyone is invited to come in theatrical costume, and the best costume wins a prize. It carries the name of Les Kurbas, and it is put on with the Ukrainian Cultural Society, the Shevchenko Foundation, Salamandra, and Kurbas.
Les Kurbas was murdered for what he made. In Richmond this September, people are going to dress up in his honour and hand out a prize. That is what winning looks like on a long enough timeline.
The Harvest Celebration
I also came away with the Ukrainian Harvest Celebration in hand: Sunday, August 30, 2 to 5 pm, John Lawson Park, West Vancouver, celebrating the traditions of Obzhynky, with Malvy, Ukraina, and the West Vancouver Community Foundation. Everyone is welcome. The week after Independence Day we go back to the harvest, which is the older calendar and, in the end, the same argument.
Tetyana Lisovyn and Diaspora.FM
Then I met the Ukrainian voice of BC. Tetyana Lisovyn and the Diaspora.FM team were there doing what they always do, which is making sure the community can hear itself. We shared a few words, and I got to say some of them out loud instead of in a message.
Tetyana is the heart of this community. She came to Kamloops to film us, she tells our stories on the radio, and she keeps people connected who would otherwise never find each other. Diaspora.FM will cover this event, so watch for it.
Natalia Chorna, UCC BC
Tetyana introduced me to Natalia Chorna, who now heads the Ukrainian Canadian Congress in British Columbia. I had read the programme before I came. Standing inside it, I understood what it took. Everything I described above, the children’s games, the bandura, the four master classes, the two languages on the microphone, the tables, the permits, the timing, all of it was somebody’s job, and the whole thing ran. My thanks to Natalia and to everyone on that team.
Mykola Kyrychenko and the word on the shirt
Mykola Kyrychenko makes authentic Ukrainian t-shirts, and Paul walked away wearing one with KOZAK printed across it. So now Paul, a teacher from Victoria, is going to keep learning that word, and everyone who reads his chest is going to ask him about it. I intend to learn a few of the designs myself.
Alisa Trempolets and Maya
This is where I cried.
Alisa Trempolets is from Sievierodonetsk. Maya is from Kharkiv. Sievierodonetsk is under occupation right now. They make wax products by hand, and everything they sell goes to support Ukraine. I made sure there is now more wax in my house than I strictly need, for me and for Mama, made by caring hands that have lost more than I can hold in my head.
You can stand on a beach in Vancouver and be told, calmly, by somebody your own size, that their city is occupied. And then they hand you a candle. That is the day I had.
SICH, and Tara Bohune
I learned about the Ukrainian Society of Identity, Culture and Heritage, SICH, based in New Westminster. A registered non-profit in Greater Vancouver where newcomers and long-term residents come together through Ukrainian art, language, history and community service. Library and archives, cultural events, art exhibitions, educational talks. Their founders are Tanya Znak, Cultural and Art Director, an MFA artist and designer with nineteen years in costume design and folk-art education, and Yulia Yakovyna, Financial and Operational Director, a marketing strategist and community activist out of UBC Sauder. Their site is ua-sich-bc.ca
Their art project was up on an easel under the trees, a grid of small painted panels, and Paul brought me there as he saw the name of my birth town Lviv.
Tara Bohune worked hard to connect me with Tanya Znak, the driver behind that project. It may take more time to make that connection happen, and I am grateful to Tara for trying. Some introductions are worth waiting for.
The educators, and what happens next
When the educators found each other it was me, Tetyana, and Halyna from Toronto, standing together and realizing we were doing the same work in three different places. We are going to keep promoting Ukrainian language and culture, and I hope we find a way to bring the Ukrainian Roots Challenge into it. So much to do, so little time, and still worth starting.
Paul, meanwhile, was connecting with a student studying biology at Trinity. This was a networking event in the truest sense: everybody there was ready to connect, and nobody had to be told why.
The Ukrainian Canadian Advocacy Group
I learned a great deal about the Ukrainian Canadian Advocacy Group, and I want to give their work its own paragraph, because it is not a small thing.
Their Raise.UA programme was built for children carrying war trauma. Accommodation and four nutritious meals a day in the Carpathians, with the food designed to support nervous system recovery. Psychological support that combines clinical biofeedback from the Netherlands with somatic psychotherapy from Denmark, then adds art, game, storytelling and dance therapy so children can work through trauma from the body and the mind, with every child measured before and after so the support is real rather than assumed. Excursions into the Carpathians so they learn their own history. English lessons, sport, acrobatics, drama, drawing, beadwork, pottery.
More than 460 children supported. More than 140 specialists trained across Ukraine. Four years of work on the ground. Four countries: Ukraine, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands.
And alongside the healing, the advocacy: roughly 20,000 Ukrainian children reportedly taken by Russia, moved across Russia and the occupied territories, and put through re-education. UCAG works for their return. If you are looking for somewhere to put money today, put it there: ucadvocacygroup.org
They organized the closing walk to the Burrard Bridge. I could not go. I had a ferry to catch, and I was already running late.
Joshua, Doug, and Jason
Uber saved me at the end. Paul and I said see you later at the departure bay, and I went back to the island with my flag still up.
Even then the day kept giving. I met Joshua and his dad Doug, from Kelowna, with Ukrainian roots out of Chernivtsi, who helped me take pictures. And I met Jason, a professional photographer from the United States, who took a photo of the sunset and told me about his volunteering work in Ukraine.
A man from Kelowna whose family came from Chernivtsi. A photographer from another country who has given his time to ours. Both of them, on a ferry, at the end of Flag Day, still holding a piece of it.
And everyone I have not named yet
I was introduced to more people in one afternoon than I can hold in my head, and I am still remembering faces. If we spoke and you are not here yet, you will be. I am writing to each of you properly. That was the promise, and I keep my promises slowly but I keep them.
Everywhere else
What I saw at Sunset Beach happened yesterday in hundreds of places at once. Winnipeg, Toronto, Halifax, Kamloops, Vernon, and far past Canada. Different beaches, different parks, the same work, the same flag, the same refusal. Vancouver is simply the window I happened to be standing in.
And the ones who actually hold it
None of this would mean anything without the people who hold Ukraine’s independence where it costs everything. The people of Ukraine, who keep an ordinary life running under conditions no one should have to run it under. And the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who are the reason there is a country to celebrate at all, and who will spend today the way they spend every other day.
Everything above, the beach, the songs, the children, the candles, the kolbasa, all of it is downstream of them. We celebrate because they hold. Say that plainly today, and then say it again tomorrow when it is no longer a holiday.
Home, close to midnight
Coming off the ferry I finally got a signal, and the first thing I did was call my Canadian Mama and tell her about the day. I passed on greetings from Tanya, from Tanya’s Mama, and from Orysia, who came to Lviv with her all those years ago to teach us. Three women on a rainy beach in Vancouver, sending their regards across the country to the woman who first brought social work practice education to my city. That circle took thirty-odd years to close and it closed in about four minutes on a phone.
Then home. Mama, Oksana and Svitlana stayed up and waited for me, close to midnight, and I told the whole story again in Ukrainian, from the ferry to the rain to the choir to the candles. Six in the morning until midnight. Every hour of it worth it.
Contra spem spero
In 1890 a nineteen-year-old girl, flat on her back through the worst of her illness, wrote a poem and gave it three Latin words for a title: without hope, I hope. It was printed in Lviv three years later, in On Wings of Songs. She did not promise to feel better. She promised to plant, to sing, to keep watch through the night. Hope in her hands was a verb.
That is how a country declares independence with no guarantee it will be allowed to keep it, and then keeps it for thirty-five years. It is also how women from Kyiv and Cherkasy who want to go home form a choir instead. It is how a woman from an occupied city sells candles for the army. It is how a teacher in Victoria ends up wearing the word kozak.
This is not hope as a feeling. It is hope that is actively happening, every single day, in the hands of people who care about Ukraine and stand with her in whatever way they can, from wherever they are.
Rain at the start. Full sun as I left. This is the only picture I am posting, because the rest of the day belongs to the people who lived it with me, and I would rather tell you about them than show you.
Happy Independence Day, Ukraine. Thirty-five years, and not one of them given away.
Leave a Reply