It is the penultimate day of our journey and it has dawned on us all that we must part ways soon. We’ll each travel forward to various places across the world- some closer like France and some farther away, like Hong Kong- but wherever we go from this point on, we’ll all carry with us a little piece of Ukraine. As we learned with the help of our wonderful language teacher and navigator -Marta Jenkala and Liisa Tuhkanen- about a culture that values friendship and human connection as one of life’s most enriching experiences, we found that we ourselves turned from a group of complete strangers to one of dear friends.
As the Ukrainians would say:
Людина без друзів — що дерево без коріння.
A person without friends is like a tree without roots.
Danube on Thames 