I write to you today from Riga, Latvia, at a refugee school for students displaced by Putin’s war against Ukraine. I write in a time of increased danger and uncertainty. Latvia, like Lithuania and Estonia, was once part of the Russian Empire, but now, as a NATO state and humanitarian refuge, remains on high alert. Within the last few weeks alone, the changes have been staggering and convulsive.
I visited the center with both of my parents. We visit Latvia every few years and stay in an apartment just outside Riga, the country’s capital.
It has been over a year since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. With hundreds of live videos and graphic updates of the cities in Ukraine being destroyed, there is no telling when this will end. On June 25, 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convicted criminal and warlord who is the leader of the Wagner group, recently shocked Russia and the world for 24 hours with its uprising against Putin and its war on the Russian Ministry of Defense. The group headed into the city of Rostov-on-Don and then headed toward the nation’s capital, Moscow. The rebellion failed. No one joined. Prigozhin then vanished behind a screen of unreliable tales. Moscow went on high alert. Prighozhhin was making a deal 125 miles from Moscow. Russia dropped its charges, and then Prigozhin fled to friendlier Belarus. Only now, he’s vanished. Just a few days ago, Russia began bombing Ukrainian port cities, destroying crops destined for the poorer nations of the world, creating shortages, scarcities and suffering.
For this past school year, here in New York, I have been fortunate enough to teach Ukrainian refugees from the ages of 7-13 over Zoom every Saturday. Now I am sitting amongst them.
The children have been relocated to Latvia due to the war and are connected through an incredible program called The Common Ground. The Common Ground is a social initiative center in Riga for people who were forced to abandon their homes due to the war in Ukraine. Its mission is to create the necessary conditions to provide warmth, food, socialization, education, and other forms of support for refugee families and their children.
The Common Ground was established by members of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art. The organization includes caring individuals, artists, professionals, and loads of volunteers who are all willing to help anyone in need of support during this crisis. The founders include Inese Dābola and Ieva Irbina.
Every day except Sunday, the program runs from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm. I was lucky enough to work remotely with the center during the year, and now I’ve gotten to experience it in real time, interacting with the children as well as getting to see this organization in action. The building is located right off the center of the town of Riga, on the lower level of a mall-like building with coffee shops and restaurants. Surrounding the building is a separate area for staff and volunteers. It has a kitchen with chairs and a buffet. In the picture below, one can see the Latvian and Ukrainian flags overlooking the kitchen. The kitchen and the center are both surrounded by open space allowing the children to park their bikes and scooters, leave their shoes outside, and also be able to freely walk around this lower level area.
There is a small library with tons of books written in Ukrainian, English, Latvian, and Russian. There are playrooms for the smaller children, a quiet room, a desk filled with computers, a kitchen, and an open area with board games and ping-pong. There is an area to buy clothes and shoes and to wash and dry clothes in the laundry room. The weekly master classes consist of social and recreational activities for the smaller children and for the older kids and adults. There are drawing workshops, language courses taught in Latvian, yoga classes, music performances, and individual psychological support. Common Ground provides refugees with information about social benefits and medical care in Latvia. The picture above is a poster wall that is located on the right of the main door. These flyers describe food and clothing availability around Latvia, where they seek psychological help for kids and adults, free events for refugees, classes for adults and children, cultural events, and general information for refugees.
With Ukraine under attack, Common Ground, a non-governmental organization (NGO), has done an incredible job of supporting children and families to get back on their feet. Some of the children I have been fortunate enough to work with include: Artem, Diana, Andrii, and Viktor. Due to the privacy and security of the family, I cannot disclose the last names of the children. However, I was fortunate to meet Artem in person when I visited. I have worked with Artem and Diana the longest. Artem is really big on zombie apocalypses and comic books. When assigned homework, he is always diligent about handing it in and will go the extra mile to complete the optional work. During class, he is always volunteering to choose the books and to start reading first, although struggles with punctuation and sentence structure. One of the assignments was to think of a title for a book they wanted to write. Along with those three chapters of that book. Artem chose to write a book about a man escaping danger, and one of the chapters was about the first day of the Russo-Ukrainian war. He uses a character to describe how he felt on the day of the war. This chapter reflected on his own turmoil and how the war has been affecting him. This deeply heartfelt story showed Artem’s progress in English and his improvement in sentence structure. He described this character spacing in detail and engraved his own fear through this character. Diana, the oldest of the children I have worked with, is very quiet and shy, but she is the most intelligent out of the group. Her English pronunciation is excellent, and has a large English vocabulary. Although she will not choose the books or start reading first, whenever there is an assignment given in class, she will have written it almost all correctly.
Even during the summer, the children come to the center to hang out, use the computers, play video games and use the resources provided by Common Ground. This could be anything from reading books to using the space to socialize with the other children. Almost all the volunteers within the Common Ground participate in this program full-time. All the volunteers who work in person are from Latvia. With the expectation of myself, I use Zoom to communicate with the children and teach them as if I were working at the center in person.
It is important to take into consideration that the families who are signed up for Common Ground are considered extremely lucky. Almost all the families within the organization had to leave their fathers as they were forced to stay and fight. Whoever had siblings, grandparents, or other elderly members of a family and mothers were only able to flee with a certain amount of money, resources, and patients. These families and along with others, had to wait in refugee camps for a period of time that is different for each family to be relocated to countries such as Poland, Germany, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, etc. However, something to note to understand the war more accurately is that the US has taken 271,000 Ukrainians fleeing from Russia under Biden’s Uniting for Ukraine program, while European states have taken nearly six million refugees.
