• 3:15 – highlights of Anjelika’s journey from Ukraine to the United States; a story of resilience and transformation through education
• 4:00 – Hamilton County Schools, helping newcomers – Anjelia knows what it is like to be a newcomer
• 4:45 – students from Guatemala, embroiled in civil war for decades – students speak dialect, making Spanish their second language, and English is their third
• 5:45 – developing the newcomer center is hard work but “I am very happy to go to work”
• 7:30 – we can teach a language but what is most important is to attend to the students’ needs, and they need a vision about their own education
• 8:15 – students want to learn – so the work of an educator never ends
• 9:00 – “We were poor, my daughter and I, we were hungry . . . sometimes we had no shoes”
• 9:45 – you must provide vision, hope, wraparound services, and then academics
• 11:45 – born in the USSR (Soviet Union) – mother’s family actually benefited from Socialism – father’s side were Christians and fled the Soviet Union (prison camps, executions, etc.)
• 13:30 – mother’s faith shifts and she was ostracized then persecution start (Anjelika about three years old at this time)
• 14:30 – Anjelika was to be taken from family by an agency because Protestant Christians are enemies of the state
• 15:15 – refugee status immersed Anjelika in multiple languages (Yiddish, Ukranian, Russian, Romanian) – but then kindergarten and first grade teachers wondered if Anjelika could even speak and had questions about her written expression
• 18:00 – return to Odessa, Ukraine – had to live in the outskirts (not a good area) – Anjelika in second grade
• 19:00 – Fidel Castro visits Odessa – working on economic and education partnership between Cuba and Ukraine
• 20:15 – Refusal to say, “We believe in ourselves. There is no God.”
• 21:00 – Girls married young then – Anjelika was 18 or 19 when she married – husband ended up in the Mob
• 22:55 – Anjelika and her young daughter were kidnapped on the street by undercover police 
• 23:55 - $100 in her pocket, seven year-old child in two, walking across borders
• 24:00 – seemingly Anjelika had nothing but she had “a huge hope”
• 25:45 – Anjelika was an ESL student, mother of an ESL student, then ESL teacher, and so on, to the role I serve in now
• 26:50 – lived in a basement of a home (cleaned the 6,000 square foot home in order to stay there) – no stove, sometimes very little to eat all day
• 28:30 – “God, if you get me out of this situation, I will do everything possible to help new immigrants”
• 29:00 – doors started opening up
• 29:45 – listen to the rest of Anjelika’s story in Episode 3

Music for Lead. Learn. Change. is Sweet Adrenaline by Delicate Beats

Podcast cover art is a view from Brunnkogel (mountaintop) over the mountains of the Salzkammergut in Austria, courtesy of photographer Simon Berger, published on www.unsplash.com.

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