Deachman: Years after being welcomed, some Ukrainians are hitting roadblocks

After building lives in Canada for the past four years, some Ukrainian students are finding it impossible to attend university

Losing her home in Ukraine ultimately helped Melana Paronyan-Iasinska decide she wanted to become an architect.

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She was 13 when Russia’s invasion in 2022 forced her parents and younger sister, Seda, from their home near Lviv, first to Poland and eventually to Ottawa.

Living in someone else’s house in a country she’d never expected to call her own, Melana began thinking about what makes a collection of walls and rooms feel like home.

“I realized my home in Ukraine meant too much for me,” she says. When she moved between spaces, she noticed a new one didn’t feel like home “if I didn’t add something to it.”

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She was good at art and math, and was already thinking she might like to become a designer, but then she began finding answers in architecture. “I realized home isn’t just a space. It has meaning. Culture, language, nations, relationships — all this is architecture.”

Four years later, Melana feels she has two homes.

Source: Read the original article on ottawacitizen.com