Our thoughts are with the students in Ukraine

To many of us here, we are lucky and happy because we can finally go back to school for face-to-face lessons. We can meet our classmates and teachers again, and join different activities. All we have to worry about might just be about whether we have nice weather when we are on our way to school, whether we have all the books with us before we leave home, or even about how long we would have to wait for the next bus to come. Life seems to be simple and smooth for us.

However, can you imagine on the other side of the world, students like us would have to face many more adversities and worry so much more when they go to school? Did you ever imagine that you, your family, your school and everything you owned, could be destroyed by the artillery, missiles, and guns? This is what the Ukrainians are facing right now. For people who live in Kyiv, Mariupol, and Kharkov, their homelands were destroyed because of an unprovoked war. Thousands of innocent civilians including kids, teenagers and youths died because of the war. For those who managed to flee the country, they became refugees and had to worry about their family members in Ukraine. They have to live in fear and pain. Across Ukraine, kindergartens have been bombed and many schools have been converted into shelters. Since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion, more than half the country’s children have been forced to leave their hometown and become refugees outside their country.

If we try to look at Ukrainian students at our age, even though teaching resumed remotely these days, many students were not as lucky as us. For us, all we had to do was to wake up on time, turn on the computer and connect to the internet. However, for the students in Ukraine, many of them could not attend lessons every day because they are not under a safe shelter, or they had to move to another safer place. What’s worse, the online lessons were often interrupted by air-raid sirens and sounds of gunshots. It was an extremely difficult time for them as they would have to worry so much about the safety of their family, friends, and afterall the most important question, when will the war end?

The first President of South Africa and Nobel Prize winner, Nelson Mandela had once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Even at the worst of times, we should never stop trying our best to learn, and to help others learn as well. Without education and school, we will have no dreams, no hope, and we will not be able to build a peaceful world and future. If we look at chapter 6, verse 2 of the Galatians, “Carry each other’s burdens and so you will fulfill the law of Christ”, even though we are physically far from the students in Ukraine, we can still try to sympathize with them by praying for them. Let us pray for peace in Ukraine, and ask God to protect the weak.

1M
Cotton, Edwin, Moon, Ian, Tian, William
18 May 2022
Photo Credit: @ UNICEF/UN0243156/Morris VII Photo