AUBG DAILY SPRING 2022 SENIOR ISSUE VOL. 3, ISSUE 2 CLASS OF 2022 By Spencer Collins On Monday, April 4, I waited for Marko. S ix weeks prior, I reached out to Marko Mazepa, an AUBG freshman who was in Ukraine during the Putin-ordered invasion. On Feb 24, Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky implemented martial law and barred men 18 to 60 years old from leaving the country. Marko is 19. Since then, Marko has feared conscription, took midterms during air raids, and ultimately, went through four countries, and used a bus, a train, a car, and a plane to go from his home in Lviv, Ukraine to Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. A guitar, a traditional Ukrainian dress, and a few odds and ends accompanied him on his trip to Bulgaria. A musician. A citizen. A student. Despite being online for a semester and a half, Marko is a Student Assistant in the Fine Arts department, helping professors and students in AUBG’s piano program. He joined the Political Science Club and attended meetings online for his first semester but he noted it was hard to do any socializing online. Nevermind socialization, doing university work online in a warzone became impossible. M arko came out of the riverside door of his new home: Skaptopara 1. He towered over me and wore a casual blazer with jeans and boots. Confident, brave, clean-cut – he is built like a soldier but chose to be a student. “I have never held a gun before, I am not made to fight,” he said. We walked around Blagoevgrad, his first look at AUBG and the city that surrounds it. “It’s a lot like Tbilisi actually, a large square, a bazaar, similar-looking streets, a cross,” he said. He reminisced and compared Blagoevgrad to his two years at New School Georgia, International School of Georgia in Tbilisi where he obtained his International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma. Marko would’ve been in Bulgaria physically for his freshman year if his IB diploma didn’t delay his visa process. He will soon travel to Skopje, North Macedonia to get his Type-D visa that all international students need to obtain their residency card. His fight to be a student isn’t over.
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