On a recent evening in Portland, 13 year-old Yuliia Knysh sat at the dining room table, holding her chatty seven-year-old cousin Nika in her lap.
Yuliia and Nika arrived in Maine last summer, with their mothers and Yuliia's older brother. Yuliia said the grown ups made the decision to leave Ukraine suddenly, catching her by surprise.
"So I had no time to think, I just, I just was shocked and I just couldn't believe," she said.
They are among at least 92 Ukrainians who have arrived in Maine since the war began, through a federal program called Uniting for Ukraine. It allows eligible Ukrainians to come to the U.S. with the support of one or more sponsors, who help them find housing, enroll in school, and navigate immigration paperwork.
Those who arrive through U4U are granted Humanitarian Parole, a temporary legal status that allows them to live and work in the U.S. for up to two years.
Yuliia’s aunt, Tetiana Izmialova, said living outside Ukraine while the war rages on back home is a strange experience.
"It's like I live for two lives in one moment," she said.
One life, she said, is in Ukraine, as she stays in close contact with friends and family still in the country, including her elderly parents.
"And one life is here," she said. "I try to live a [normal] life, to study English, to find [a] job."
Izmialova, who worked as a travel agent in Ukraine, said she’s currently in training for a customer service position at the Portland International Jetport.
Izmialova said she wakes up every morning and checks the news from Ukraine, hoping to one day read that the war has ended, and she can return home. Izmialova said even as she’s taking steps to rebuild her life here, the unpredictability of the war makes it impossible to plan for the future.
"I don't know what it will be tomorrow. I live such a life for one year. I don't know what to do tomorrow," she said. "It’s very hard."
Her sister, Iryna Knysh, said she too wants to return to Ukraine, but isn’t sure when that will be possible.
"Yes, I want to see my family and hug them. But I have [not] any plans to," Knysh said.
Knysh said she’s especially concerned for her parents, whose access to electricity has been unpredictable after Russia bombed the grid infrastructure in their city earlier in the war.
Adding to her worries is her family's two-year legal status in the U.S. She said she’d like to believe the war will be over before their Humanitarian Parole status expires, or that the U.S. government would consider extending the program. For now, though, she said they’re all focused on just putting one foot in front of the other.
"I don't know what to do," she said. "We try to live like, step by step, a little — day by day."
For Knysh, that means taking English classes at the Immigrant Welcome Center in Portland, where she’s also interning as an accountant, a field similar to the one she worked in back home.
And for her teenage daughter, Yuliia, taking it day by day means continuing to improve her English, and trying to make friends at school. Yuliia said the prospect of returning to Ukraine some day is complicated, because it would require them to, once again, start over.
"And we will just break our life here," she said. "And it's just difficult to build a new life and then break it."
Still, Yuliia said, she’d rather live with her friends and family in Ukraine.
