After returning to Thibodaux from her home in Ukraine, Nicholls State University student Mariia Kozachok said she sometimes wakes up after hearing what she thinks are explosions.
“I woke up at 5 a.m. and started freaking out,” the 22-year-old MBA student said. “My boyfriend asked me what was wrong, and I told him the missiles were flying. He told me it was just the wind. It’s weird to wake up and not hear air sirens going off.”
Kozacho had been trapped in the war-torn country after visiting her family in Dnipro, a city of nearly 1 million people about 240 miles southeast of the capital, Kyiv. She recently embarked on a treacherous four-day journey to return to Thibodaux.
Though her city has not experienced the violence and destruction of other besieged areas of Ukraine, Kozachok said the fear of invasion hovered like a cloud over Dnipro.
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“Every morning air sirens were going off,” she said. “At night there were also air sirens going off. We just got used to it.”
She originally arrived at Nicholls from Ukraine in 2016 and played tennis four years before graduating in 2020 with a degree in accounting. While working at the Nicholls recreation center, Kozachok decided to return to the Thibodaux university to earn a master of business administration degree.
In December, she decided to visit her family, whom she hadn’t seen in two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. She had planned to return to campus in time for classes that began March 14, but then the Russian army marched across the border into Ukraine.
After weeks of taking Nicholls MBA classes on Zoom during the wee hours of the morning, Kozachok made the difficult decision to leave Ukraine.
“It was dangerous because I had to go through the entire Ukraine,” she said. “There were some explosions and bombs near the train, but I made it.”
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With her family’s support, Kozachok embarked on a perilous journey on a train through some of the hardest-hit cities in Ukraine until she reached the Polish border.
“I was supposed to cross the border on a train but the train got stuck,” she said. “The crew lady told me to get out and to get an Uber, which would take me across the border. So I got out in the middle of nowhere and an Uber found me and brought me to the border. I couldn’t cross the border by walking; I needed somebody with a car. A lady just stopped her car and said she would take me over the border and dropped me off with another volunteer.”
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As Kozachok made her perilous escape through the beleaguered nation, her MBA professor John Lajaunie kept up with her progress through text messages.
“That’s when I was most worried about her, when she was on the train,” Lajaunie said. “My phone lit up at 2 a.m. and I told my wife Mariia was on the move. I was trying to keep track of her as she traveled. Once she was out of Ukraine, it was just a matter of her getting here. The stress levels went down once she got out of Ukraine.”
After arriving in Warsaw, Poland, Kozachok flew to Istanbul, Turkey, and then on to Chicago before touching down March 29 in New Orleans.
Ray Peters, director of Nicholls’ master of business administration program, said the university community was happy to see Kozachok return safely.
“It’s absolutely wonderful to have her back,” he said. “We were so pleased that she was able to get back. One of the things about our MBA program is that it’s fairly small and we’re all connected together. By the time a student graduates, they’re like family.”
Now that Kozachok is back on Louisiana soil, she said she feels an overwhelming sense of relief. She reunited with her boyfriend and said she is focusing on finishing her MBA.
“I’m happy to see everybody,” said Kozachok, whose fingernails last week were painted with the blue-and-yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag. “I’m happy not to be up at 2 a.m. to attend classes anymore. When I walked into the business building, everyone screamed in excitement. Everybody’s been happy to see me. It was scary and tough, but I made it.”
— Staff Writer Dan Copp can be reached at 448-7639 or at dan.copp@houmatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanVCopp.
This article originally appeared on The Courier: Ukrainian graduate student returns to Nicholls after four-day journey