In the coming weeks, he brought two of his friends and their children there. He reached out to a vacation rental in rural Romania where he’d stayed before, and they wanted to help. And so I contacted my friends and I said, ‘Maybe you should come to Romania.’” “Then I realized, I sort of remembered this joke that I made. And I was like, ‘Well, what do I do now? Do I just go home?’” he recalled. And so I couldn’t believe it was happening - people here couldn’t believe it was happening.” “Everything I’d read told me this was a really bad mistake for Putin, by any metric. “When the war started, I was just flabbergasted,” he said. He was in Romania when Russia invaded on Feb. “And that is ultimately what happened,” DePalatis said. As he parted with friends, they had a running joke: if things went badly, he would meet them at the border. His tourist visa ran out in February of 2022, so he went to Bucharest, Romania to secure a work permit. “Most of the Ukrainians I talked to in November would say something like, ‘Oh this, Russia, you know, nothing happened.’ And then as things kind of got more and more escalated, by January, they weren’t really saying that anymore, and there was some concern,” he said. Things would soon change, but at the time, the idea of conflict escalating with Russia felt unlikely even to Ukrainians. He took the opportunity to visit some friends he’d made over the years in Ukraine - in Kyiv and some other cities. He was teaching in Washington, but after a year of navigating teaching music during COVID, DePalatis decided to take a year off and use some money he’d saved to travel. Trouble seems to find me one way or another.” I happened to be in Iran in 2009, during the disputed elections there. Generally, my style of travel is to go find really interesting things, sort of, in places where angels fear to tread. “I just walk the earth,” DePalatis said an interview over Zoom, earlier this month.
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Being a music teacher left his summers free to travel to far away places. They’re raising money for medical supplies - or, as the name of their fundraiser suggests - to “Help John and Julia Save The World.”īut how did this American teacher end up in Ukraine? For eight years, between 2006 to 2014, DePalatis was the band and choir director at Sitka High School. The man next to her is former Sitka music teacher John DePalatis.
She’s a former flight attendant turned military medic in the war in Ukraine. It’s clear, in that moment, they’re good friends.Īs Julia talks to the camera, she’s in sharp contrast to the building behind her, which is blackened from missile fire. She fist bumps him after he introduces her, and he cringes, rubbing his knuckles pretending to be in pain from the force of her fist. In the YouTube video, a man wearing a burgundy polo and baseball cap gestures to a woman on his left, wearing a periwinkle dress peppered with tiny white flowers.
After a month of airstrikes and fighting, the Ukrainian military retook the city. John DePalatis and his friend Julia (whose last name has been omitted from this story) standing in front of a badly charred building in Irpin.
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