4/1/2022
Happy April Fool’s Day!
####################################################
Spokesman-Review
Shawn Vestal - Shooting settlement was bad-faith failure of justice
Washington OKs first statewide missing Indigenous people alert
KREM
KXLY
The Inlander
####################################################
Spokesman-Review
Shawn Vestal - Shooting settlement was bad-faith failure of justice
All of the sadly ordinary obstacles to police accountability leaped to the fore this week with the settlement of a lawsuit against a sheriff’s deputy who killed a mentally ill man in 2019.
The lawsuit raised valid questions about the shooting of Ethan Murray, who was chased into the woods and shot to death on May 4, 2019. The deputy who shot him initially claimed he had a knife, though it turned out the only knife found at the scene belonged to another deputy, who later said he’d dropped it.
The shooting had been ruled justified by the prosecutor, who has never met a police shooting that wasn’t justified. The cleared deputy was promoted.
Murray’s mother hired an attorney, whose complaint posed troubling questions about the shooting. But instead of producing answers, one way or the other, the lawsuit was simply settled by the county.
Spokane County paid $1 million – a painless payout that will come from a joint insurance fund shared with other counties – but neither the deputy, nor the sheriff’s department, nor county government at large was in any way held responsible or formally cleared of the suit’s claims.
In fact, as if to illustrate the utter bad faith behind it all, the sheriff and prosecutor held a news conference, whining about The Spokesman-Review,criticizing defense attorneys and other elected officials, relitigating old complaints, claiming excessive use of force by law enforcement is statistically insignificant, and – wait for it – working in an implied pitch for a new jail.
No. This bore little resemblance to justice.
Meanwhile, our understanding of the death of Ethan Murray, and the performance of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office during two days where he was repeatedly reported for displaying the obvious signs of someone suffering a mental health crisis – two days that ended when he was chased into the woods by Deputy Joseph Wallace – is no clearer than it was before.
This is not a critique of the Murray family for settling. It’s a critique of a system that offers no reliable, independent oversight of the fatal actions of officers. We have a “take our word for it” system – investigations of shootings conducted by neighboring departments, who are practically co-workers, and prosecutors, who are also practically co-workers. Between the two, it is always possible to meet the low bar of justification for a shooting – an officer’s claim that he reasonably felt threatened.
This is why the city ombudsman’s office is such an important institution (though it is not involved in county cases like Murray’s.). It’s also why that office has been in constant conflict with the city police administration and officers union, who have been able to defang the ombudsman, to a degree, from the start.
If we truly want to improve our systemwide crisis of mental illness, and the role of law enforcement in it, we would not resolve the Ethan Murray case this way. At a time when homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse test the abilities of police and government, it deserved a true, independent accounting of what went wrong, not a million-dollar cover-up.
Murray’s case is troubling for reasons beyond the shooting. Over the course of the final two days of his life – May 3 and 4, 2019 – he was reported to city and county law enforcement six times. Each time, according to police records, he showed the signs of the schizoaffective disorder with which he had been diagnosed.
He was often shirtless and shoeless, filthy in his socks. He talked to himself and said things to officers that didn’t make sense. He stuffed money into his mouth.
He made people uncomfortable, and those who reported him often assumed he was on drugs – though the investigation after his death did not find drugs in his system, according to the lawsuit. On five occasions, he was dealt with by officers who seemed to recognize that he was troubled, not dangerous. On five occasions, he was questioned and simply let go. One city officer gave him a ride.
On the sixth call, though, that changed.
Residents of an apartment complex in Spokane Valley reported Murray was running around near children. Some considered him threatening. When deputies arrived, Murray was standing, shirtless and shoeless, on the other side of a chain-link fence.
When he was confronted by Wallace, he ran toward the woods, where there was a homeless camp. Wallace chased him there, where he claimed that he found himself trapped in a situation with a dropoff at his back so he couldn’t safely retreat. He said that Murray cursed him, ignored his commands, and threatened him with a knife, so he shot him.
No one else saw this happen. Prosecutor Larry Haskell said Thursday that a witness heard “a good bit” of the altercation and “largely corroborated” Wallace’s report.
In his report, which was released 30 days after the incident, Wallace referred repeatedly to the supposed knife. But the only knife found at the scene belonged to another deputy. After it was initially entered as evidence, it was later removed, and the story evolved: Murray was threatening Wallace with a pair of sunglasses that was found at the scene.
In the lawsuit, the Murray family’s attorney noted that in all the previous interactions with police – in which Murray possessed nothing but what was in his pockets and hands – there was no indication he had sunglasses. The suit also questioned why Wallace didn’t do what other officers had done in the two previous days – use de-escalation techniques. It questioned why he chased him into the woods at all.
It may be that a jury or a judge, or some other independent finder of fact, would have concluded that Wallace was justified. But we got nothing like that in this case.
We got a painless payout from the county, a furious round of “take our word for it” from the people in charge, and an absence of accountability.
A travesty of justice. Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or at shawnv@spokesman.com.
SHAWN VESTAL
SPOKESMAN COLUMNIST
Washington OKs first statewide missing Indigenous people alert
By Gillian Flaccus and Ted S. Warren
ASSOCIATED PRESS
TULALIP, Wash. – Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on Thursday signed into law a bill that creates a first-inthe- nation statewide alert system for missing Indigenous people, to help address a silent crisis that has plagued Indian Country in this state and nationwide.
The law sets up a system similar to Amber Alerts and so-called silver alerts, which are used respectively for missing children and vulnerable adults in many states. It was spearheaded by Democratic Rep. Debra Lekanoff, the only Native American lawmaker serving in the Washington state Legislature, and championed by Indigenous leaders statewide.
“I am proud to say that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s and People’s Alert System came from the voices of our Native American leaders,” said Lekanoff, a member of the Tlingit tribe and the bill’s chief sponsor. “It’s not just an Indian issue, it’s not just an Indian responsibility. Our sisters, our aunties, our grandmothers are going missing every day ... and it’s been going on for far too long.”
Tribal leaders, many of them women, wore traditional hats woven from cedar as they gathered around Inslee for the signing on the Tulalip Reservation, north of Seattle. Afterward they gifted him with a handmade traditional ribbon shirt and several multicolored woven blankets.
The law attempts to address a crisis of missing Indigenous people – particularly women – in Washington and across the United States. While it includes missing men, women and children, a summary of public testimony on the legislation notes that “the crisis began as a women’s issue, and it remains primarily a women’s issue.”
Besides notifying law enforcement when there’s a report of a missing Indigenous person, the new alert system will place messages on highway reader boards and on the radio and social media, and provide information to the news media.
The legislation was paired with another bill Inslee, a Democrat, signed Thursday that requires county coroners or medical examiners to take steps to identify and notify family members of murdered Indigenous people and return their remains. That new law also establishes two grant funds for Indigenous survivors of human trafficking.
This piece of the crisis is important because in many cases, murdered Indigenous women are mistakenly recorded as white or Hispanic by coroners’ offices, they’re never identified, or their remains never repatriated.
A 2021 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found the true number of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S. is unknown due to reporting problems, distrust of law enforcement and jurisdictional conflicts. But Native American women face murder rates almost three times those of white women overall – and up to 10 times the national average in certain locations, according to a 2021 summary of the existing research by the National Congress of American Indians. More than 80% have experienced violence.
In Washington, more than four times as many Indigenous women go missing than white women, according to research conducted by the Urban Indian Health Institute in Seattle, but many such cases receive little or no media attention.
The bill signing began with a traditional welcome song passed down by Harriette Shelton Dover, a cherished cultural leader and storyteller. Dover recovered and shared many traditions and songs from tribes along Washington’s northern Pacific Coast and worked with linguists before her death in 1991 to preserve her language, Lushootseed, from extinction. Women performed an honor song after the event.
Tulalip Tribes of Washington Chairwoman Teri Gobin said Washington and Montana are the two states with the most missing Indigenous people in the U.S. Nearly four dozen Native people are missing in Seattle alone, she said.
“What’s the most important thing is bringing them home, whether they’ve been trafficked, whether they’ve been stolen or murdered,” she said. “It’s a wound that stays open, and it’s something that we pray with (for) each person, we can bring them home.”
Investigations into missing Indigenous people, particularly women, have been plagued by many issues for decades.
When a person goes missing on a reservation, there are often jurisdictional conflicts between tribal police and local and state law enforcement. A lack of staff and police resources, and the rural nature of many reservations, compound those problems. And many times, families of tribal members distrust non-Native law enforcement or don’t know where to report news of a missing loved one.
An alert system will help mitigate some of those problems by allowing better communication and coordination between tribal and non-tribal law enforcement and creating a way for law enforcement to flag such cases for other agencies. The law expands the definition of “missing endangered person” to include Indigenous people, as well as children and vulnerable adults with disabilities or memory or cognitive issues.
The law takes effect June 9 and some details are still being worked out. For example, it’s unclear what criteria law enforcement will use to positively identify a missing person as Native American and how the information will be disseminated in rural areas, including on some reservations, where highways lack electronic reader boards – or where there aren’t highways at all.
The measure is the latest step Washington has taken to address the issue. The Washington State Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People Task Force is working to coordinate a statewide response and had its first meeting in December. Its first report is expected in August.
Many states from Arizona to Oregon to Wisconsin have taken recent action to address the crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women. Efforts include funding for better resources for tribal police to the creation of new databases specifically targeting missing tribal members. Tribal police agencies that useAmber Alerts for missing Indigenous children include the Hopi and Las Vegas Paiute.
In California, the Yurok Tribe and the Sovereign Bodies Institute, an Indigenous-run research and advocacy group, uncovered 18 cases of missing or slain Native American women in roughly the past year in its recent work – a number considered a vast undercount. An estimated 62% of those cases are not listed in state or federal databases for missing persons.
The law is already drawing attention from other states, whose attorneys general have called to ask how to enact similar legislation, said state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who called the law “truly groundbreaking.”
“Any time you’re doing something for the first time in this country, that’s an extra heavy lift,” he said. “This most certainly will not be our last reform to make sure that we bring everybody back home. ... There is so much more work that needs to be done and must be done.”
Dennis Willard, of Bellevue, holds up a protest sign as he marches in support of missing and murdered indigenous women during a rally to mark Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Oct. 14, 2019, in downtown Seattle.
####################################################
KREM
In more than 30 reports, staff at Spokane Public Schools demonstrate resistance to file police reports without permission from the SPS Director of Safety.
SPOKANE, Wash. — Police reports that were reviewed by Spokane Police Chief Craig Meidl show that staff and administrators at Spokane Public Schools (SPS) have inconsistently responded to reports of threats, physical and sexual assaults on campus.
The reports were obtained by KREM 2 Investigators through a public records request. The majority of reports obtained were not filed by SPS as a whole but were filed by individuals.
The reports come as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating the district for allegations of criminal activity in schools.
According to documents, a physical education teacher at Ferris High School wanted to press charges against a student who threatened to kill her in January 2022.
Another teacher who witnessed the incident said the student threatened to kill the P.E. teacher, called her an inappropriate name and said, “boom boom boom,” while “pointing his hand in her direction as if he’s holding a handgun."
In a letter to Meidl from Lt. Rich Meyer, he said the P.E. teacher wanted to press charges against the student, but said she could not do so until she checked with the SPS Director of Safety Randy Moore. The letter states that he was not available on the day of the incident and could not be reached for six days after.
Meyer said officers on scene were under the impression that SPS is requiring teachers and staff to get permission from Moore before involving the police. KREM 2 learned in early March that the SPS school board and district amended campus safety documents that discourage teachers from reporting violencedirectly to the police.
"I have a great concern with the school district doing this as incidents could escalate that will put students in great danger," Meyer wrote to Meidl.
According to the letter, Moore told Meyer that he did not know why the P.E. teacher felt that she needed permission "to be a victim of a crime," but added that he "recognizes the issues of mixed messaging from SPS."
While police say the January Ferris High School incident demonstrates staff's resistance to contact law enforcement, several reports reviewed by Meidl show administrators contacting law enforcement after reporting the incidents to school officials.
Multiple incidents of assault at Lewis and Clark High School were documented in the reports, including a student assaulting a special education teacher in October 2021. According to the report, the teacher filed a police report a month after the incident.
The report says the student, who operates at a second-grade level, suddenly started kicking and punching another staff member before turning his attention to the teacher. The teacher said the student began punching the back of his neck and head before he fell to the ground. The teacher did not touch the student.
The teacher went to the hospital for treatment and left school early. He then contacted the school to find out when he could come back, but documents say he was told he count not come back to work because he was under investigation.
In early November 2021, another incident occurred at Lewis and Clark High in which a student was punched by another student while leaving the school, causing him to fall, hit his head and be knocked unconscious.
Police were called to Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center more than 12 hours after the incident occurred. The student was being treated for injuries that required surgery, though the police report did not specify his injuries.
The report does not mention whether staff alerted police to the incident.
In another incident at Glover Middle School, the assistant principal called police in April 2021 after she learned an eighth-grade student was having a sexual relationship with an 18-year-old man.
The assistant principal told officers that the girl is “very anti-police and would refuse to communicate any of this information with uniformed officers.” Responding officers decided not to question the girl or her family further to ensure they would not escalate the situation, according to the report.
SPS planned to hold a news conference on Thursday to discuss its safety policy but canceled the meeting on Wednesday afternoon. The district instead sent an email detailing the campus safety model and said they were unable to comment.
“Although we are happy to talk about our safety model, its history, and the current positive impact on students and families, we are unable to answer any question that could be perceived as relating to the current FBI review,” SPS said in a statement.
####################################################
KXLY
Posted: March 31, 2022 5:25 PM by Will Wixey
Credit: Safety Net's website
POST FALLS, Idaho — Safety Net is holding a donation drive on Saturday to provide furniture and kitchenware for foster teens.
The drive is accepting new and gently used furniture, like loveseats, very small couches, futons, along with dining sets, kitchen appliances and utensils.
Mattresses or linens are not being accepted. There’ll be coffee and donuts available as well.
If you’re thinking about donating, Safety Net says to think small items for small spaces. You can view the drive’s wishlist here.
The drive is on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 202 Seltice Way in Post Falls, Idaho. For more information or to arrange a pickup, call 509-863-9431 or email admin@safetynetinlandnw.org.
####################################################
The Inlander
FROM LEFT: Ukrainian Spokane residents Olga Churkin, Anna Zinchenko and Mira Zobov, sell rice pilaf to raise money for Ukrainian humanitarian aid and to support refugees.
Alexander Kulabukhov is up at 5 am on Feb. 24, jolted awake by the explosions in his neighborhood. As Russian artillery fire blankets their neighborhood in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the walls of Kulabukhov's house shake. His terrified daughters are shaking, too. For the next four days, his family and their neighbors hide in their basements and cellars, dreading the next salvo, trying to decide whether to stay or flee.
He's a lifetime away from the child he once was, the kid who'd spend a day at the beach with his friend Tim, scampering up on the big logs used to mark the swimming area, diving into the water again and again.
Tim left Ukraine when Kulabukhov was only 13.
But now, as the Kulabukhovs leave behind their friends, their vehicle resale business, their school, their home, their country, as they flee across the Ukrainian border into Poland, that childhood friend has become the person who changes Kulabukhov's fate — and maybe even saves his life.
Kulabukhov calls Tim Oberemok, now owner of a thriving family-owned trucking company in Washington state, and asks if there's any way Tim can get him and his family to Spokane.
"I knew if there ever was a difficult situation, Tim will be there," Kulabukhov says.
He recounts all this, sitting in the office of Roller Valley skate center, a Spokane Valley business owned by Tim's wife, Zhanna, a Ukrainian refugee who immigrated to Spokane back when the Soviet Union fell in 1991.
Russia's invasion of its East European neighbor has flooded Spokane's Slavic community with waves of outrage and grief as they've watched their friends and family in Ukraine come under siege. It's also ignited a flurry of humanitarian activity, including efforts to bring a lot more Ukrainians like Kulabukhov to Spokane.
"The Ukrainian people are like mighty eagles with their wings clipped," says Zhanna.
In America, she suggests, they can truly fly.
In most ways, Sunday's service at Pastor Alex Kaprian's Pilgrim Slavic Baptist Church can seem indistinguishable from other Protestant churches downtown: There's the children's choir filled with squirmy kids wearing adorable bow ties, the variation of the hymn "How Great Thou Art," the impassioned sermon, the slideshow of missionaries passing out Bibles in Cuba and the announcements urging parishioners to donate to humanitarian work in Ukraine.
The big difference? The entire service is delivered in Russian or Ukrainian. Since so many Ukrainians, including Kaprian, came here as refugees fleeing the Soviet Union's religious discrimination, these often very conservative churches serve as the backbone of one of the biggest Slavic communities in the country.
Kaprian, who spent two decades working in refugee services for Washington state, estimates that there are around 50,000 Russian-speaking people in the Spokane area.
"I joke sometimes that only the KGB knows the exact number," he says.
But if his guess is accurate, Spokane has about as many Slavic people as Black, Asian, American Indian, Pacific Islander and multiracial people in Spokane County combined.
Part of it's the weather, Kaprian suggests; like Ukraine, Spokane gets all four seasons. Some of it might be the existing mix of ethnicities, including Americans with Slavic and Russian roots, which made it easier to fit in. But most of all, it's that immigration has a way of snowballing: The more Ukrainian families in Spokane, the more connections they have to any Ukrainian immigrants looking to move to America.
The Ukrainian immigrants in Spokane don't just hear about the war from the news. They get dispatches from the front from their friends and their family.
Violet Tsyukalo, who left Ukraine when she was 2, hears about a family friend who went from teaching theology classes to making Molotov cocktails in a basement. She hears from friends trapped in central Mariupol in southeast Ukraine, with no electricity, no power, no gas. The thin stream of water coming out of their faucet feels like a miracle.
Mira Zobov, who immigrated to the United States when she was 16, learns about how her former neighbors in Kharkiv are in their kitchen with friends — just down the block from Zobov's old home — when a Russian Smerch rocket smashes through their bedroom ceiling. She watches the Instagram video of the aftermath. She hears from her aunt who can see rocket launchers outside her home in the Kharkiv countryside, but who refuses to leave, preferring to "just trust in God," and stay with her chickens, dogs and cats.
Oleksandr Tarasiuk, who immigrated here just four years ago, is waving Ukrainian and American flags at the Lincoln statue on Saturday. He hears from his 52-year-old mother-in-law in eastern Ukraine, who sleeps under her table every night. One day, the fighting during the siege of her city was so intense, she fled to the forest nearby and stood there in the dark all night.
In parts of the local Slavic community, this kind of shared horror and grief can be a uniting force, even with some of the local Russians. Tsyukalo says she knows Russians who planned some of the pro-Ukrainian rallies in Spokane.
But there are also local Russians who take Putin's side. Zhanna Oberemok says this tension isn't new: There are stories of fistfights breaking out in local churches when the first Russian-Ukrainian conflict began in 2014, she says.
"It's a huge challenge for the pastors to keep the peace," says Zhanna.
So when Russia invaded this year, Kaprian says he did the same thing he did in 2014. He called together all the Slavic pastors in the area, and they agreed to a shared set of principles: They would agree to oppose war — as Christians, they were opposed to bloodshed — but they wouldn't take sides; they would focus on humanitarian aid, whether it be Russian lives or Ukrainian lives, but wouldn't get into politics.
But at times, Zhanna suggests, that taboo can feel suffocating.
"You know what is on every single person's mind," Zhanna says. "People are coming with their hearts pierced to the soul. But you can't really talk about it in the Slavic churches."
Yet there's no question the war weighs heavily on Kaprian, too. When a rocket in Ukraine hits a car full of men trying to deliver supplies to a church drug rehab facility, some of his friends are among the four killed.
But the messages Kaprian hears from those in Ukraine are neither the heroic Ukrainian propaganda splashed across Twitter nor the drumbeat of Russian disinformation blasted out from Russia Today. He hears accounts of atrocities committed by soldiers from both Ukraine and Russia, of the carnage wrought on civilians by both Russian artillery and Ukrainian munitions.
"War is war," he says.
Daniel Walters photo
Pastor Alex Kaprian cried after watching a bridge where he fished as a child in Ukraine get destroyed.
At first, Tarasiuk wants to go back to Ukraine to fight in the war himself. He and his wife argue about it for a week. She cries. They have children — including the little boy in the Baby Yoda shirt waving the yellow and blue flag with him at the Lincoln statue downtown Saturday.
Eventually, Tarasiuk concludes he can do more good here, simply by raising money and wiring it to Ukraine. Across the entire Slavic community, Ukrainian immigrants and their allies scramble to find ways to aid both the Ukrainians suffering in the war and the newly arrived refugees.
They launch a website at SpokaneHelpsUkraine.org, sell T-shirts, cook rice pilaf and hold "Roller Skate for Ukraine" roller rink nights to raise money. Beside the tip jar at the Ukrainian-owned Cedar Coffee, blue-and-yellow ribbons sell for $3 apiece to contribute to the fund.
They collect food, medicine and clothing as well — over 6,000 pounds — though they're still trying to figure out the best way to get such a big delivery to where it's needed.
Aleks Kutsar and Pavel Turovskiy, Spokane residents who immigrated from Ukraine decades ago, say that God told them to go to Poland to help. They rent a warehouse in Poland, buy two cargo vans, and ferry food essentials like flour, rice and oil to the Ukrainian border. They also rent a house, which they use as a temporary shelter for the flood of new refugees into Poland.
"They're still in shock," Kutsar says over video chat from Poland. "We try to comfort them as much as we can, but there is not much we can do."
Other local attempts to aid Ukrainians are messier. Former Spokane Rep. Matt Shea, married to a Ukrainian immigrant, flies to Poland and ventures into western Ukraine to pick up nearly 60 orphans who had fled Mauripol. But Shea's defiant interactions with local Polish authorities, connections to a far-right Polish pastor, and the decade of controversial headlines — including an investigation that accused him of participating in domestic terrorism — sparked a kind of firestorm of rumor and controversy in Ukraine. Soon, the story was being covered by not only the Seattle Times and Rolling Stone, but a slew of local Polish news outlets as well.
Polish radio reporter Anna Gmiterek-Zabocka tells the Inlander that she was concerned about whether Shea — a "good manipulator," she says — is attempting to indoctrinate the children. In her own interview with Shea, she says, he left out the fact that he was trying to adopt four of the children from the orphanage.
Kaprian says that Shea called him and asked him to ask his congregation if there were any teachers willing to go to Poland for several months to teach the children from the orphanage. (The Polish government has committed to educating Ukrainian refugees, though their sheer numbers have strained their school system.)
Kaprian has also asked his congregation if they're interested in adopting the children from the orphanage, but is frustrated that the Ukrainian government won't allow adoptions currently. He says there's no ulterior motive to the Slavic community's efforts to adopt the children.
"The motivation is very simple," Kaprian says. "We love God. We love people. We love children. And we love especially orphans who are in need."
The bullet comes to a stop just in time. Irina Sapielkna's just outside of Kharkiv in northern Ukraine — only 60 miles from the Russian border — trying to escape with her family, when she hears a hail of gunshots.
One bullet punches through the car door and the driver's seat — through steel and plastic and fabric and upholstery and three layers of clothing — and it hits her in the back. But it doesn't go deep enough to seriously wound her. Sapielkna's daughter later finds the bullet embedded in the car seat, plucks it out and throws it away.
And now, Sapielkna and her family are safe in Spokane. She's at the Roller Valley rink in Spokane Valley, along with the Kulabukhov family and four other new Ukrainian refugee families.
Sapielkna's grateful. She's alive. For now, she says, she's put the trauma of escape behind her. She smiles and beams as she holds up her bloody shirt with the bullet hole. Her son is sleeping, slumped over beside her next to a big slice of roller rink pizza.
Zhanna says she and her husband, Tim, have connections to all six of the newly arrived refugee families here at the rink.
Getting here didn't just mean escaping their war-torn cities, it meant getting across the Ukrainian border — no easy task, considering it's technically illegal for Ukrainian men to leave today. Once they got to Poland, they couldn't go directly to the United States. Instead, Zhanna says, they flew to Mexico, then drove to the American border, showing their Ukrainian passports, and were granted humanitarian parole — a visa status to live in America, at least temporarily.
Last week, President Joe Biden announced the United States would be taking 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. Advocates like Kaprian and Zhanna Oberemok are waiting to learn what that means for the long list of families that could come to Spokane.
Meanwhile, Kulabukhov, Tim's childhood friend, is eager to start his new life.
"We want to get our driver's license, we want to get our Social Security numbers figured out, and we want to start learning English," Kulabukhov says. "We want to get jobs."
But it's hard, too. Spokane's housing crisis makes finding places for refugees to live particularly difficult. His kids are showing signs of homesickness. His son misses the Ukrainian soccer field. His daughter misses her music classes.
Zhanna remembers what that's like, to be a young girl thrown into a wildly different culture in a foreign land, far away from her home. But she also remembers the way her Coeur d'Alene elementary school threw her a surprise birthday party — the first real birthday party of her life — complete with a Little Mermaid cake, little party hats and a massive present filled with dozens of books donated by her classmates.
"At one point, we were on the other side of the spectrum," Zhanna says. "We came literally with nothing but a suitcase to this country,"
Welcoming more Ukrainian refugees is her way of paying that kind of generosity forward.
"It really is living the American dream," Zhanna says. ♦