Why August 24 is a critical day in my life Photo: With Mama at Saratoga Beach, August 24, 2026, before we drove up to stand at the 50th parallel marker. Thirty-five years of independence, and the person who taught me to ask questions long before the state allowed them. Фото: З Мамою на пляжі Саратога,…

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…

On Monday, Ukraine turns thirty-five. On 24 August 1991, in an ordinary school notebook and in about ninety minutes, Levko Lukyanenko drafted the text that the Verkhovna Rada adopted that same day by 346 votes. In December, more than ninety per cent of voters confirmed it in a referendum. That is the arithmetic. Thirty-five years,…

Sunflowers from my Kamloops garden. A year ago, there was honey cake Last August I wrote a story about a small yellow sign on Victoria Road in Summerland, and about the family behind it. The Sunflower Ukrainian Café became a ritual for Mama and me: borscht that tastes like a Ukrainian winter kitchen, varenyky made…

Tonight in Kamloops: The Last Human in the Universe Speaks Ukrainian U Are the Universe (Ти — Космос) Saturday, August 8 at 7:00 pm Paramount Theatre, 503 Victoria St CINEMA PASSPORT UKRAINE, presented by the Kamloops Film Society in partnership with the Simya Ukrainian Society. Thank you Michelle, for sharing information. Earth is gone. Andriy…

A response to the congressional letter on Canadian wildfire smoke [Photo: the sky near Ashcroft, British Columbia, July 19, 2024. I took this picture myself. The sun is a pale disc behind the smoke, and a STOP sign stands at an empty intersection. This is what wildfire season looks like where I live.] Last week,…

Тепер мрія має номерOn the first Faculty Development Program I created and delivered, a certificate from Lviv, and a dream carried to Nairobi A certificate arrived from Lviv this week. Number 0009790. Visiting Professor Program, Lviv Polytechnic National University, from 23 March 2026 to 23 June 2026, a course of 60 hours for the faculty…

On what people get wrong when they say “AI did it,” and what my students and my mentors taught me instead. People often look at the work and say, “AI did that.” I always answer yes. AI co-creates with me. But then I ask them to read the letters again, because there is a “+”…

On the night I left Kamloops, I had just finished teaching my final in person class of 2026 at TRU. Fall is my non-teaching term, the season I keep for research and service, so this evening carried that particular feeling of one chapter (21 years of in-person teaching in Canada) closing while another quietly begins.…

Earlier I wrote about our small Kamloops safari to Isobel Lake, where the big game was a herd of cattle and the gentle residents were a goose family on the water. The weekend before I fly to Nairobi, we went on a bigger safari still. Mama, Oksana, and Svitlana and I packed up and drove…

This week I fly to Nairobi for a conference, to the land of the true safari. But before any of that, on a Friday after work, I went on a different kind of safari, closer to home, and in many ways closer to my heart. I took Mama Lidia to Isobel Lake. If you have…

On my bed this week, laid out on a checkered cloth, sit the small documents that make a big journey possible: a Canadian passport, a Republic of Kenya eTA, a TMVC International Certificate of Vaccinations, and the familiar yellow International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Looked at one way, it is just paperwork. Looked at…