Dr. Danuta Charland is a Pre-Health Academic Advisor at Boston University's Sargent College, and in 2026 she marks 40 years of living in the United States. Danuta grew up in Kashubia, an ethnic region in northern Poland with its own language and identity distinct from the broader Polish culture — a heritage she carried through a childhood under the Iron Curtain and into an American life that began, improbably, with a two-dollar penpal address.
In this conversation, Danuta walks through what it meant to grow up Kashubian inside Poland, including the quiet discrimination her family faced for speaking their own language, and what it was like coming of age under Soviet-era censorship — including a professor imprisoned for collecting a list of Solidarity Movement supporters, and her own encounter with an armed National Guard patrol on the way home from visiting her brother at university.
At the center of the episode is the story that gives it its name: how a high school English assignment led Danuta to write to the International Penpal League of Boston, how her husband Tom bought her address for two dollars out of curiosity about Poland's role in World War II, and how four years of letters — delayed by dictionaries, reviewed a dozen times before being sent — became a courtship, a delayed airport reunion, and a marriage now spanning more than four decades. Danuta reflects on what that slower, more deliberate way of connecting gave her that instant communication today doesn't, and on the long, nerve-wracking process of leaving a communist country to build a life in the U.S.
This episode is for anyone who has ever wondered what patience and delayed gratification can build — and for anyone navigating what it means to hold two identities, two languages, and two homes at once.
Danuta's poetry collection, Często normalny świat, is available directly: https://czec.pl/czsto-normalny-swiat or https://kaszubskaksiazka.pl/poezja/1067-czesto-normalny-swiat.html (ISBN 978-83-66052-95-6).
Her essay "Immigration" (pp. 337–340) appears in Daniel Kalinowski's Emigracja kaszubska w Stanach Zjednoczonych: historia i dziedzictwo (The Kashubian Emigration in the United States), Akademia Pomorska w Słupsku, 2022: https://czec.pl/emigracja-kaszubska-w-stanach-zjednoczonych-historia-i-dziedzictwo
Reach Danuta directly at [email protected].
#DecodingAmerica #ThriveAbroad #ImmigrantExperience #PolishAmerican #Kashubia #PenpalStory #IronCurtain
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About Simone W. Johnson-Smith Simone is the founder of Thrive Abroad and The Bridge Concepts, LLC, a Jamaican-born American intercultural strategist, coach, and former U.S. diplomat. She is the International Impact Book Award-winning author of Decoding America & Coming Home to Yourself: The Immigrant Experience — available in print on Amazon, and as an audiobook (ElevenLabs-narrated) on Spotify, Barnes & Noble, Rakuten Kobo, and other major retailers via InAudio — and host of this podcast, reaching listeners in over 100 countries.
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