The Student Newspaper of Cathedral Catholic High School

Dons Press

The Student Newspaper of Cathedral Catholic High School

Dons Press

The Student Newspaper of Cathedral Catholic High School

Dons Press

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Kyiv, Ukraine

Having lived in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East, senior Olga (“Talia”) Volodymirovna Mazepa developed more respect for her Ukrainian heritage during her first ten years of life in Kyiv, Ukraine. Yet, even though she has lived in the United States for only three years and is not yet a citizen, she sees herself becoming more American every day.

Here in San Diego, Talia tries to grasp all the opportunities she can before attending college. She has an intricate character and is not just “the heel girl” on campus (She often wears high heels.) Aside from also being a religious film fanatic, Talia has picked up modeling, played badminton, performed in the last two drama productions, and given up her lunches in order to serve students their meals at school. She finds satisfaction in knowing that she can make a buck on her own while receiving an education. And through all this, memories of other Ukrainian children and teenagers never leave her. A number of these individuals have deeply touched her life.

“Ukrainian teens are much more independent,” she said. “They are pretty much on their own by the age of sixteen. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was much harder to earn money; therefore, both parents usually had to work. That does not leave much time for the children. I started kindergarten by the age of two. From an early age, teens learn to survive without their parents. It’s not that we don’t love or need them; it’s exactly the opposite. It makes you appreciate the time you have with them more.”

Talia’s earliest memory is her christening in a grand and ornate Ukrainian cathedral. “I was placed into a really, really cold tub and christened with a gold cross by a pastor with a really bushy beard who was also dressed completely in gold,” she said.

But like most other Ukrainians who were facing the hard life early, this golden gleam didn’t shine forever. Talia had her own turn of fate, an immediately taxing scenario when she tried to settle with her recently divorced mother. Her mother worked three jobs while raising Talia alone.

During this time, Talia started taking introductory English. Then, when her mother was going to marry a French man, the English language seemed to become “irrelevant”, and she didn’t start taking real English lessons until two years later when her mother announced they were moving to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to be with an American, “Vic,” to whom she was engaged. He was living there to work for the oil company Saudi Aramco.

“We had a nice old lady that smelled like cats come in and teach me British English (“pupils” instead of “students”, and all the “colours, favours, honours”). My mom would feed her tea and biscuits while I did everything possible to escape another grammatical exercise in the notebook,” Talia said.

“I must have been very good at avoiding work because, by the time Vic came and they walked down the aisle and we got into that airplane, I knew five words in English: hello, goodbye, cat, dog and the phrase ‘What is your name?’ I knew my new family for exactly five days before I started sharing a house with them.”
For the next five years, Talia became an “Aramco Brat” and embraced this label, as she made many new friends in Dhahran, people with whom she still communicates through Facebook and Skype. She said that these people can be easier to relate to than the friends from her homeland because many of the children she knew in Ukraine are already in college and finding jobs.

When Talia’s stepfather eventually expressed his interest in retiring from Dhahran to San Diego, Talia googled “San Diego high schools” to quickly find the USDHS link online. She said, “I saw the pictures of the campus they were building and was sold.”

Both Talia’s mother and Vic now enjoy living in “America’s Finest City.” Talia’s favorite spot in the city is Seaport Village which she visited with her family one summer break before moving to San Diego. Ever since, the attraction, along with the snicker doodles she loves, has been a comforting experience.

What drives Talia to excel is passion. “I try not to do things that I don’t care about. There is just no time for them,” she said.

Aside from her fears of phone calls and driving, she is terrified of regret. “I don’t want to be the fifty-year-old mother, going through a midlife crisis because of all the things I regret not doing when I was young. I think that if you’re passionate about something, go ahead and do it. But make sure you won’t have regrets.”

Among her list of aspirations, Talia hopes to attend a school on the East Coast and study hotel management. She also dreams of traveling as often as possible because she dislikes staying in one place for too long. Her outlook is that travel is the best way to empathize with others. She said, “The more I travel, the more I realize how little I matter as a person, but what a big difference I can make for a person.”

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Kyiv, Ukraine