I happily opened my home to a Ukrainian mother and daughter

Terwilliger is a voice actor/media producer and lives in Kensington.

In general, I am a very lucky person. My parking karma is off the charts. And I usually manage to make light at El Cajon Boulevard and the southbound I-15 ramp. But right now, I feel like I’ve won the lottery – a creative and emotional lottery.

In February, when the war in Ukraine started, I placed my spare room on Airbnb to donate to a refugee, if needed. This need arose in early October, when I received a text saying that a woman and her 8-year-old daughter needed accommodation for at least two weeks, but suggesting that a month would be better. Vera and Vasy Ustyanskaya arrived in San Diego after spending five months in Poland to stay with a couple who had agreed to sponsor them.

It was a precarious time, to say the least. They were completely dependent on their sponsor for food, shelter and daily amenities. Vasy started school and they both started learning English, their fourth language so far. They already spoke Ukrainian and Russian and had just learned Polish.

Their original host ruthlessly chased them away. The shock of not knowing where they were going to stay took an emotional toll, especially on the child. A Ukrainian school here in San Diego paid for five hotel nights, but Vera’s savings ran out.

I had a brief phone call with the coordinator for Ukrainian refugees in Virginia who texted me about the situation, and I said yes, “Send them tonight.”

It’s been a little over a month now, and they’re welcome to stay with me until their documents make their way through our immigration system or the war is over and Vera Ustyanskaya feels safe to to return home with her husband and family – still in Zaporizhzhia. Her husband’s job is to fix airplanes, and while they can keep in touch, the situation changes every day, making it hard for Vera and her daughter to stay positive.

Vera struggles to leave her family, tries to work through our government’s paperwork, and finds ways to help her baby girl understand and process what’s going on.

But she is able to turn some of that emotional trauma into healing art. Turns out she’s a very talented professional oil painter, and she has my entire garage/workshop to install it canvases. The fact that I had this space was just fortuitous (this chance again). She started with still lifes of all the fruits and vegetables lying around and is now working outdoors again. The webs are starting to pile up!

Vera is very resourceful and has made contact with local artists and galleries, where a few of her paintings now hang, showcasing her talent. She teaches a weekend art class at the Ukrainian Lutheran Church School in Tierrasanta which helped her find emergency housing and filled my garage with colors and aromas of oil paint. ‘oil. She and her daughter are learning English at an incredibly fast pace.

We settle into an easy pattern. And after hearing my assurances that she has free accommodation until she finds another accommodation, she transfers her daughter to a school near my house. For the past month, she has taken city buses to school every morning – commuting between an hour and a half and two hours each way – to school near the home of people who brought her here.

Vera has no income yet, but she has managed to find walls for a few of her paintings in galleries in Hillcrest and La Jolla. I hope to help her find other venues where she can showcase her work and perhaps earn a living as a professional painter again while she figures out what lies ahead for her and her daughter.

In the meantime, my home vibrates with creativity, youthful energy and the aroma of Ukrainian comfort food. I am happy to open my home and my heart. Just luck, I guess.