You could become pen pals with Ukrainian children thanks to NC professor. Here’s how
A North Carolina professor couldn’t sit back while the streets and neighborhoods of Ukraine, his home country, were being bombed by Russia.
With schools closed, many Ukrainian children are at home or in bomb shelters, so Vasyl Taras, a professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, created a pen pal program to connect children in Ukraine with peers around the world, he said in a March 18 Facebook post.
“Many have been displaced and are far away from their friends,” he wrote in the post.
One month of war in Ukraine has displaced 4.3 million children — more than half of the country’s estimated child population, according to UNICEF.
Friends of Taras asked him to find “international friends” for their children so they could practice English, talk to someone and “take their minds off the war,” he said in his post.
The program provides the opportunity for kids from all over the world to learn more about Ukraine, make new friends and “support peers in distress,” the pen pal website states.
Pen pals are matched by age, according to the website, and the program is currently open to people between the ages of 10 and 23. The professor said he will consider relaxing the age restrictions after initial testing of the program, according to his post.
“I thought it would literally be five friends of mine from Ukraine and maybe a few kids from the United States,” Taras told WFMY. “Literally (the) next day we (woke) up (with) a few hundred applications.”
Pen pals can communicate through email, Zoom, Skype, Facebook, and more, Taras said in his post.
The professor was born in Ukraine but has spent the last 20 years in the U.S. and Canada, according to WFMY. His parents are still in Ukraine.
“The parents … tell us that all of the sudden they’re back to normal at least a little bit,” Taras told WFMY. “They talk again, they practice English, but also have some welcome distraction, literally, from death.”
This story was originally published March 25, 2022 at 12:10 PM with the headline "You could become pen pals with Ukrainian children thanks to NC professor. Here’s how."
