Currents News Staff
She’s got a pink backpack, a warm smile and started making new friends. Seventeen- year-old Alla Renska, a Ukrainian, has only been in Budapest, Hungary for a month. In an empty classroom of her new school, Renska says she never thought she’d end up here.
“No…no war. It’s 21st Century. It’s Ukraine. It’s Europe. Why?” asks Alla.
Before the war, she was a normal teenager making goofy videos with her friends, taking selfies. But then she recalled exactly when the war reached where she lived in Kyiv.
“When we heard explosions and our house was shaking,” Alla said.
Her parents made the agonizing decision to send her to stay with friends in Budapest. Alla’s dad took her to the train station on March 4. But in the crush of people also trying to leave, they were separated.
She took pics from the train: a bleak landscape she says matched how she felt. But then, she had an idea. She wrote an email to Korosi Baptist High School, one of the best in Hungary talking about the war and what happened to her.
“I really want to go to school and continue studying,” she wrote. “I kindly ask you to help me.”
Help they did.
The school converted these old containers into dorms where Alla now lives and studies. Her days are spent in classes and at night. She chats with a few other Ukrainian girls just like her who also fled now living there too, even though she does still miss her family.
“It’s unfair,” she says. “It’s so unfair that I should be here and my parents there.”
The U.N. says more than four million refugees have fled Ukraine since the start of the war more than a month ago.