A Ukrainian flag hangs from the second-floor window of the Harpers’ house in Hancock.
Inside the home, there are index cards taped to various items: the door, a chair, the kettle in the kitchen. The top word is written in Ukrainian and underneath is the phonetic spelling using the English alphabet.
Anastasiia Himp is from Svitlovodsk in Ukraine. She was studying film at a Ukrainian university, and once she graduated she decided to sign up for an au pair program. She moved into the Harpers’ house in Hancock in the fall.
“I wanted to have this American experience,” Himp said, “I was watching a lot of movies” and she wanted to practice her English.
When she met the Harpers over a video call, it seemed like a good fit. Kat Harper is half-Ukrainian and wanted her children to connect to Ukrainian culture and language.
However, it wasn’t a simple task for Himp to become an au pair as Russia continued its invasion of Ukraine.
“I wasn’t able to go to the embassy in Kyiv. It was closed,” Himp said, “I had to go to Poland.”
Once in Poland, Himp was able to go to the embassy and get a visa that allowed her to travel to the United States.
When Himp left Ukraine, her father was working in a factory. At the beginning of November, he got a summons to fight in the war. At first he was stationed in central Ukraine. Then he was moved to the front lines. He was fighting in Bakhmut, on the western edge of Ukraine, before he recently suffered a concussion in a Russian shelling and was taken to a hospital in Dnipro. One of his commanders was killed and another is in serious condition.
For Himp, it feels like a repeated nightmare.
“I had my friend, I knew him from when we were babies,” she said, “He was 21 years old when he died in the war. He was military, in the same region my dad is in right now [before being taken to the hospital]. I just don’t want this to happen again.”
Himp had been sending her paychecks to her mother in Ukraine to send to her father, as he needed equipment and there are major shortages.
“You guys were trying to get boots to her dad,” Jim Harper said, looking at Himp and Kat across their dining room table. “She was sending her whole paycheck to spend on boots. I was like, ‘A lot of people care a lot about this. This is a way to help a real person. A real family.”
He created a GoFundMe page to help raise money to support Himp’s family. He learned that GoFundMe does not allow campaigns that aim to supply weapons or supplies to soldiers, so he made it clear in the description that the funds would go toward helping Himp’s family in the city of Svitlovodsk. He and Kat shared it with the community and on Facebook, where it reached people across the country, people they had grown up with or classmates from school. It quickly surpassed their goal. They increased their goal to $2,750. As of Friday, the campaign has raised $2,575.
Jim said he even has a childhood friend who is going to send equipment – separate from the GoFundMe campaign – to Himp’s mother and then on to her father.
“It’s been my experience that people care,” Kat said. “People will ask us, ‘How can I help?’”
Himp has some contact with her father, but there have been periods of time when she has not been able to call him. She has a 16-year-old sister who is with their mother in Svitlovodsk.
“She’s very stressed. It’s very hard,” Himp said.
At the beginning of the war, Himp said her city wasn’t initially being bombed, but they felt the effects.
“The first days people went a little bit crazy,” Himp said, “I remember we went to the store and the shelves were totally empty.”
Then things escalated.
“When the first siren went off at night we were like ‘Oh my gosh, what do we do?’ You don’t know what to do really,” she said.
They ran to the basement, but felt unprepared.
“After three or four months, you hear sirens and don’t think about it. It’s really weird,” Himp said.
She said a bomb hit a shopping mall in the city over from her family and “a lot of people died. I was in that shopping mall a couple months ago.”
In the last month, there were three or four bombs. One was close to her mom’s work.
“It was really scary for her,” Himp said. The power goes out intermittently, and Himp has to make an effort to take breaks from the news.
“I’m trying not to read too much,” she said. “Sometimes it is too much. I’ve been reading what I need to know.”
For Kat, “It feels a lot like history repeating.”
Kat’s grandparents grew up in Ukraine. At the beginning of World War II, they were taken into a labor camp in Aschaffenburg, Germany, by Nazis as forced laborers. Kat’s grandmother worked in a hotel and her grandfather was a gardener. Kat’s mother was born in the camp. In December of 1949, they boarded the USS General R. M. Blatchford and came into the United States through Ellis Island.
Kat grew up in New Jersey in an area where there was a vibrant Ukrainian population. Her grandmother, mother and aunt all spoke Ukrainian.
Kat hasn’t been to Ukraine, but she hopes to be able to go one day.
“I don’t speak fluent Ukrainian,” Kat said. “I really wanted to learn more of the language before traveling there.”
When the war started, “For all the wrong reasons people were becoming more familiar with Ukraine,” Kat said, but “It’s been really nice to watch the world fall in love with Ukraine. The culture is very close to my heart – it’s been very interesting to see how people care and are inspired.”
Still, there’s a lot of Ukrainian history that much of the United States isn’t familiar with.
From 1932 to 1933, millions of Ukrainians died in the Holodomor, a manmade famine caused by Soviet government policies under Josef Stalin. On Dec. 15 of this year, the European Parliament recognized the Holodomor as a genocide, which Russia still denies.
Even though Americans started learning about the war in Ukraine in 2022, Russian aggression started before then.
“If you talk to Ukrainians, they say this is not the beginning of the war,” Kat explained, “It started in 2014 [when Russia invaded and occupied Crimea]– this is just the invasion.”
Himp grew up speaking both Ukrainian and Russian. Often, she spoke a combination of both languages. In social circles, Russian was often considered “cooler.”
“Russians can’t understand Ukrainian language,” Himp said, “But Ukrainians can understand Russian.” She explained that in the past “the Soviet Union government was trying to make Ukrainian language disappear.”
Kat and Jim have two young children, and they say now it’s more important than ever for Kat to connect with her Ukrainian roots and share Ukraine’s history, culture and language with their children.
“When we decided we wanted to have an au pair it was obvious to me I wanted a Ukrainian au pair,” Kat said, “We’re very happy to have Anastasiia here and know that she’s safe.”
Those interested in donating to the GoFundMe campaign in support of Himp’s family can do so at gofundme.com/f/help-anastasiia-help-her-family-in-ukraine.
The Harpers hosted a Ukrainian au pair, Valeriia Fobulian, earlier in the year who has since moved to Texas to be with her fiancé. Because Fobulian was in the United States when the war started, she was granted temporary protection status. Now, the Harpers said she is waiting on documents that will allow her to work, and they stay in regular contact.