Salinas Teachers Return After Two Weeks With Children at the Polish-Ukrainian Border

MC Weekly reporter Agata Popęda spoke with Patricia Matulas Mason, who teaches English as a second language, Spanish and French at Alisal High School, and Gabrielle DeVilla, a science teacher at Washington Middle School. Both describe their journey and what motivated them to help Ukrainian children and educators.

Excerpt:
Summertime at war is not fun for anyone, but what a bore the war is for children, as Lucy, Peter, Edmund and Susan, the original crew of The Chronicles of Narnia can attest. When your city is being bombed and your dad is with the army, there is no real summer vacation. Adults are busy and anxious. Sitting in the bunker is not swimming in the lake. Under the circumstances, even some school instruction doesn’t sound bad. A magical wardrobe would do, as Lucy found out, but what about a summer camp in a foreign land, in a foreign language and, more importantly, without war as a constant theme? To a group of children from the Ukrainian town of Yavoriv, at that very moment, in July 2022, it sounded as magical as Narnia.

Read A group of American teachers spent two weeks with children at the Polish-Ukrainian border. Two of them, Salinas educators, just returned and shared the story, at the Monterey County Weekly.