D'YOUVILLE UNIVERSITY 25 NOVA NORMA THE NEW NORMAL Two days after the invasion, Yelizaveta Proponeko, her mother, her 10-year-old brother and their 69-year-old grandfather got in the car and headed west to the Polish border — a 13-hour drive on a normal day. This day was far from normal. The family spent four days in their car due to the long lines and the chaos found at the border. When they finally connected with relatives in Poland, Proponeko got to work finishing high school and finding a college. She was originally set to attend a surgical school in England, and her family had even put down the first two years of tuition. But uncertainty forced her family to request a refund, and Proponeko scrambled to find an alternative. Two weeks after her 17th birthday, she was accepted into two schools — one in Prague and another in Buffalo, New York. Proponeko had never heard of D’Youville University, but the thought of receiving a private education for free — at a school located half a world away from the war and devastation back home — sounded too good to be true. D’Youville flew her in late that summer — she was joined by her brother and mother, who wanted to make sure the offer was real and not “some sort of scam.” The university was very real, and for the first time in months, Proponeko could breathe easier. “I really liked Buffalo, but it was very hard at first,” she recalls “I think of myself as a family person, and while maybe I wasn’t scared to be here, I was worried, because I knew I was going to be alone for four years, and my family would be so far away.” Instead of returning to Poland, Proponeko’s family made the difficult decision to rejoin her father in Kryvyi Rih, a city that has suffered significant civilian casualties in the last four years. In 2024, an attack on a nine-story residential building resulted in several deaths, and just last April, a ballistic missile targeted apartments, schools and businesses, killing 19 and injuring another 72. The destruction has become, sadly, a “way of life” for residents who’ve remained in Kryvyi Rih, Proponeko says. She has returned home most winter and summer breaks, and even now, she and her brother must sleep downstairs, where it’s safer from nearby explosions. “There will be nights when my brother and I will try to fall asleep, and we’ll just count the number of explosions we hear in the distance,” she says. “Sometimes they wake you up, and sometimes, now, you just sleep through them. I know this will sound crazy, but each time I go back, it’s easier and easier for me to adapt to all of that. Right now in Ukraine, people will hear an explosion, and they will keep doing whatever they were doing, because this is their life now. They’re trying to rebuild and live their lives, and they’ve accepted that this is the way it is.” It’s difficult enough to focus on school in a new country when there is a real threat to family back home, but Proponeko and her fellow Ukrainian classmates had to also deal with a language barrier that first year in Buffalo. Proponeko says her English was “limited” when she arrived, and she struggled when friends and professors spoke too fast. But as her language skills improved, Proponeko found her comfort zone at D’Youville as she studied biology and eventually discovered a love of dentistry over her initial plans of medical school. Yaro Malynych (center) and Maksym Poplavskyi (left) chat with Mike Taheri during a breakfast held for D’Youville’s Ukrainian students in 2024. Both Malynych and Poplavskyi (who are roommates) are chemistry majors set to earn their degrees this May.
