For Students from War Zones, Summer Break Was a Reminder of Home

The Washington Post / Anika Arora Seth

15:36 JST, September 2, 2024

For most college students, summer break includes a visit home. Seeing hometown friends, eating comfort food, sleeping in childhood bedrooms.

But for international students displaced by war, summer was difficult to watch.

“I have not been home for more than two years now,” said Marta Mysiahina, a Ukrainian student who begins her sophomore year at Georgetown University this fall.

Mysiahina is from Kharkiv, 18 miles from the Russian border. Her family fled the city in early 2022 as Russian forces invaded. Though Ukrainian soldiers were able to push back Russian attempts to Kharkiv, it remains under heavy fire from missiles and artillery to this day. Much of the city is in ruins.

Mysiahina, 18, returned to Ukraine this spring, but she could not visit Kharkiv. As she spent the summer taking classes in D.C., she longed for home.

“I still have this division between coming home and coming to Ukraine,” Mysiahina said, “because Ukraine is my home country, but my home is Kharkiv.”

Tens of thousands of people in similar situations study at U.S. colleges each year. In the 2022-2023 school year, nearly 55,000 college students were displaced or had refugee status, according to a report by a group of college leaders called the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

That figure probably underestimates the scale of students who fled their countries, the report said, while the list of conflicts around the world is only growing. The U.N. refugee agency said this year that roughly 120 million people were displaced by war, persecution or similar events – 1 out of every 69 people globally.

As colleges prepared to reopen after the summer recess, The Washington Post spoke to six displaced undergraduate and graduate students in the United States, as well as one recent graduate. They described an emotional roller coaster, navigating the academic and personal stressors that define any college experience while yearning to connect with their loved ones – and, in many cases, mourning lost homes.

Thoughts of home

As campuses across the country exploded in protest and counterprotest after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the war against Hamas in Gaza, some students felt the impact of conflict more personally.

Abdalrahim Abuwarda was selected as Gaza’s sole Fulbright Scholar in 2022 after applying for the prestigious program four or five times. Overjoyed that years of labor had finally paid off, he never expected that his two years at the University of Wyoming would coincide with a war that destroyed his home.

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, local authorities say. Over the last eight months of his master’s degree, Abuwarda lived with the fear that his wife, children, siblings and parents would join the rising death toll. His fear spiked when his youngest daughter fell ill with cholera.

“I had to focus on my thesis and my courses,” said Abuwarda, 31. “And at the same time, I had to be aware of the fact that in any moment, my whole family would be killed.”

In June, after eight months of war had ravaged Gaza, Abuwarda’s wife and three children – ages 6, 4, and 2 – finally joined him in Wyoming. When he saw his family at the airport, he felt like he “owned the whole world.”

Many of his colleagues cannot say the same.

Salah El Sadi, who received Gaza’s Fulbright scholarship the year after Abuwarda, began his master’s program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro last September. Sadi, 37, was supposed to return to Gaza this November, but war broke out mere weeks after he arrived in North Carolina.

Sadi has not seen his family since. He rarely speaks with them because of the poor internet connection in Egypt, where his wife and two young children escaped.

“There was no inspiration to continue to study,” Sadi said. “I couldn’t even try to focus.”

Such feelings are familiar to students like Valerie Malykhina, a Ukrainian student who will soon be a senior at Vassar College. She has seen her family displaced twice – first from Donetsk in 2014, as Russia-backed separatists took over the city, and again from Mariupol in 2017 amid constant Russian attacks.

Her grandmother has stayed in Donetsk, despite the decade-long Russian occupation.

“My grandmother is still alive, but I know I’m never going to see her again,” Malykhina said.

While other students went home this summer, Malykhina, 21, worked at a health center in western Ukraine that provides prosthetic limbs and trauma care to Ukrainians injured in the war.

Malykhina’s male friends face different risks. Amid a shortage of recruits, most adult men are banned from leaving the country without special permission due to the military draft.

Mysiahina, the Georgetown student, is among the many Ukrainians with new military ties. Her father enlisted after Russia’s full-scale invasion. Sometimes she won’t hear from him for days on end.

Even on those days, which she called “the hardest of all,” Mysiahina headed to the library, worked hard on assignments and showed up for her campus job. But she has found it difficult to get academic accommodations, as mental health-related extensions feel designed for intermittent personal crises, not an ongoing war.

“The world expects you to be a fully operating human being, even though you’re experiencing things that honestly, a person, a young teenager, should not,” she said.

‘I cannot tell anyone about it, especially my family’

Asadullah Azimi, one of Mysiahina’s classmates at Georgetown, made it to Washington with the help of a program by the U.N. refugee agency and educational technology company Duolingo that advises refugee students. He left Afghanistan in 2019 and moved with his mother to India, where he stayed for about four years.

Azimi, 22, is grateful to study in the United States, but he feels stuck. His parents are in Finland; he applied for a visa to see them but was denied because the government thought he might illegally overstay, Azimi said.

While most of their classmates went home for the break, Azimi stayed in D.C. and took summer classes with Mysiahina. He hasn’t seen his father in nearly a decade.

Another Afghan studying at Arizona State University this fall was part of a group of Afghan students who were resettled with the aid of the International Rescue Committee after the Taliban seized power. The 24-year-old student spoke on the condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

“I’m so tired. I just want to talk with someone, but I cannot tell anyone about it, especially my family, because they should be happy at least about me,” she said. “I miss my home, my family, everyone.”

The legal context for students from war zones can differ wildly based on their country of origin and immigration status, among other specific circumstances, according to IRC communications officer Stanford Prescott.

To an extent, some students from Afghanistan had a fortunate legal status: arriving as Afghan humanitarian parolees entitled several students at Arizona State to the “full set” of refugee services, Prescott explained, which includes financial and housing support.

Sadi, who is in the United States from Gaza on a student visa, cannot access refugee status. He relies on monthly extensions of his current visa, which does not allow him to seek work, and lives in a dorm room provided by the University of North Carolina. He can only prolong his stay for 18 months, he said.

Sadi doesn’t know what will happen after the remaining half of his extensions run out. “I lost everything … my research … my country … my family,” he said.

Even with their homelands in conflict, students are often wooed to their campuses because they see studying in the United States as the opportunity of a lifetime. Diing Manyang, who grew up as a South Sudanese refugee in northern Kenya, graduated from George Washington University in 2018. Manyang co-founded the nonprofit Elimisha Kakuma to help others from Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp reach college campuses abroad.

But for some, it can be hard to see the future once physically separated from war and kin.

“Returning home would be nice, but you cannot predict whether your home will be there in a couple of years,” said Mysiahina, the Ukrainian student at Georgetown. “What state will your home be in? Will you have people to return to who you call home?”