On 6:00 p.m, February 24th, 2022, I was scheduled to interview with ENGin, a nonprofit volunteer organization looking for volunteers to teach Ukrainian students English. Despite being worried about my ability to teach while not knowing Ukrainian, despite the fact that that same day, Russia invaded Ukraine, I met Raya, my “student,” a few months later for the first time. My first few lessons with Raya consisted of concrete lesson plans, where I would teach and she would take notes. Over time, however, we began to converse like new friends, learning about each other and our lifestyles, so vastly different. I shifted our manner of learning to strictly conversational English, helping her when she didn’t know or understand certain words. Though we lived in different countries and participated in completely different manners of living, Raya and I bonded over our shared cultures and heritages. We learned about each other’s countries, told stories about school, our friends and families, our towns/ cities, our everyday experiences and gossip from people neither of us would ever meet. Raya and I are going on almost two years of continuous friendship, and at this point, it feels wrong to consider myself a tutor, considering that she has taught me just as much, if not more, than I have her.
Volunteering with ENGin has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It is incredibly easy to volunteer- you give your name, gender, age, and interests, and are paired with a buddy with similar characteristics. This creates the ability not only to tutor, but to become friends with a person as similar to you as possible. It is also plentiful in hours: over two years, I have built up over 150 volunteer hours speaking with Raya. Every one of those hours was spent laughing, talking, and always learning.
Raya was directly impacted by the war. Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was being bombed constantly. There were times I could call her late at night here in New Jersey, when it was the middle of the night in Ukraine. This was because Raya had changed her whole sleep schedule around- she now slept according to the allotted slots of WiFi and electricity in different parts of the country, considering that Ukrainian power plants were being constantly targeted by Russia. It was strange, being so far away from a conflict, yet having a direct peep into the horror that was her life. It was even stranger to come to school and see the shock over the war rapidly fade, news stories describing Russian atrocities slow down, and feel just a little bit of the helplessness Raya and Ukraine were feeling as the world simply began to lose interest in something that was not happening in their own backyards.
My experience with ENGin taught me that no matter who we are, where we live, what kinds of lives we live and kinds of people we are, we always have something in common. I also learned that through the belief that we are all too different to share common ground, we as people tend to stop caring about one another, about strangers in other countries. ENGin has given me the opportunity to flourish in this regard, to become more worldly in my views and examine other perspectives. Not only is it a brilliant volunteer opportunity with the chance to do good in the global community, but it is brimming with lessons I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
