By Peter Vankevich
When Sonya Voitenko arrived on Ocracoke Island in August 2021, she expected to spend a year experiencing American culture, improving her English and learning about life in a small coastal community.
She did not expect a war to change the course of her life.
Voitenko, then 15, came to the United States through the Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) program, a merit-based scholarship initiative funded by the U.S. Department of State. The program allows high school students from participating countries to spend an academic year living with an American host family and attending a U.S. high school.
Her placement was Ocracoke, and she welcomed the opportunity.
“I found out it was a small island, and I was very excited for it because I’d never been to the ocean before,” she recalled during a recent interview on WOVV’s What’s Happening on Ocracoke.
Voitenko attended Ocracoke School, where her junior-year class had only about 15 students. Although she had studied English since first grade, using the language every day in an unfamiliar environment presented challenges.
“The Ocracoke dialect was kind of hard in the beginning,” she said.
The island’s close-knit community soon helped ease the transition. Her curious fellow students welcomed her, and Ocracoke gradually began to feel like a second home.
Voitenko was an accomplished volleyball player and joined the school team. She later found herself playing basketball for the Lady Dolphins.
“I had never played basketball in my life,” she said. “They just told me, ‘Oh, you’re tall enough. You can play.’”
During one game, which happened to fall on her birthday, Voitenko scored her first basket. The crowd responded with a standing ovation.
Voitenko is from Sumy, a city of roughly 300,000 people in northeastern Ukraine, near the Russian border. When she left for the United States, she expected to return home after completing her exchange year.
Then, halfway around the world, everything changed.
After months of Russian saber-rattling and denials that an invasion was imminent, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
“It was late at night when a friend messaged me that the war had begun,” Voitenko recalled.
At first, she could not believe what she was seeing on social media.
“I was like, ‘Wow, there’s no way this is happening,’” she said.
She spent the remainder of the night communicating with her family through WhatsApp and FaceTime.
Sumy was among the Ukrainian cities affected during the early stages of the invasion. Her parents, Vitaliy and Liudmila, and her 12-year-old sister, Masha, left Sumy for their grandparents’ village, where they sheltered during the first months of the war. Vitaliy, an engineer, was unable to work.
Back on Ocracoke, island residents rallied to provide support for her and her family.
At Jason’s Restaurant, 300 spaghetti dinners, along with a table filled with baked goods and Ukrainian souvenirs, quickly sold out. The event raised $7,000 for Voitenko’s family and Sunflowers for Ukraine, an organization that provides medical supplies. The Ocracoke United Methodist Church held a fundraising pancake supper.
The Lady Dolphins basketball team added its own expression of solidarity, posing with the Ukrainian flag alongside their teammate.
Voitenko also began speaking publicly about the war, appearing as a guest on “What’s Happening Ocracoke” WOVV, Ocracoke’s community radio station to explain what was happening in her country and what it meant for her family. Her friends and family were able to listen online at wovv.org.
The war also changed Voitenko’s plans for the future.
Her visa was extended, and she was transferred to the Chicago area, where she completed high school at Grayslake North High School. The move from Ocracoke to suburban Chicago was a dramatic cultural shift.
“In Ocracoke, everybody’s one unit,” she said. “It was much easier to make friends here.”
Voitenko went on to enroll at Loyola University Chicago, where she is majoring in information systems and analytics in the Quinlan School of Business. She will enter her senior year this fall.
Although she left Ocracoke in 2022, her connection to the island never ended keeping in touch with her teachers, fellow students and their families . Over the past few years, she has returned during Christmas breaks and summers to visit the friends she made during her exchange year.
This summer, she and her mother returned to the island and held two bake sales at the community market to raise money for Ukraine.
She also returned to the WOVV studio, this time as a young woman looking back on an experience that began as an ordinary student exchange and became something much more profound.
The war that changed her life continues, and so does her connection to the community that supported her when it began.
For Ocracoke, she feels became part of the island community and is her second home —and, in the process, she gave islanders a personal connection to a distant war and a reason to care about the people living through it.
Her return was also an opportunity to thank the community that welcomed a Ukrainian teenager as one of its own when the world around her suddenly changed.
