![]() ![]() It was October 31st, she says, continuing to share her life story - all of it - in unhesitating detail. More than four million Ukrainians have fled their country 90 percent of those people are women and children, CNN reported March 31. Since Russia’s military invaded the country more than a month ago, Tina and the rest of the world have watched civilian and Ukrainian fighters killed, cities and landscapes reduced to rubble and an unfolding generational humanitarian crisis as women, children and elderly try to outrun bombs and missiles for refuge in border nations. It breaks my heart to watch my homeland fall apart,” Tina wrote on a handout she left with area downtown business in Keene recently, seeking donations to help support “these precious (orphaned) children who are scared for their lives.” She has friends and relatives trapped in the deadly war perpetrated by Russia’s military, and she cannot help but think of how difficult life in the orphanages there must be. Anger and despair over the ongoing conflict in her native country for Tina have real-life context. Though Tina spends her time immersed in study, student life, and tying up loose ends ahead of commencement, these days Ukraine is rarely far from her thoughts. In Tina’s case, it did not have to do with her adoption, but with her financial status based on adoption, says Kevin Justice, assistant director of admissions at the college. The University System of New Hampshire program provides, in qualifying instances, free tuition for Pell Grant-eligible students. “The way I was greeted, the way the college was presented, I turned to my mom (that day), and I said, ‘I can totally see myself here.’”įrom her first year, Tina has benefited from Granite Guarantee. Tina says her connection with Keene State occurred on Admitted Student Day and was immediate. Ideally, she would write to “inspire people to do the things that others did to change my life.” Fluent in Russian, Tina can imagine working with orphanages and adoption agencies. Being a writer at heart, the process will be cathartic, too, she says. Her memoir is too important not to finish, Tina says. “It’s hard to focus right now, and just try to be happy with all that is going on” she says, bluntly, referring to the high-profile and deadly war in her homeland. Tina is writing a memoir, though progress has slowed. I admire her ability to just keep going.” Memoir will tell the whole story “I admire her ability to adapt and grow with everything life has thrown at her. The hardships she has overcome “are hard to comprehend,” her best friend and roommate, Emma Rico ’22, says. Tina will receive a bachelor’s in English May 7 at Keene State’s commencement. ![]() Unrelentingly tragic as her upbringing in Ukraine was, it remains the underpinning of who Tina is - a bright, curious, at times brash, and engaging 23-year-old about to graduate college. I’m that young and for the longest time I’m feeling that no one wanted me.” When Tina was of school age, Vladimir and Nadya used state assistance funds for Tina not to buy her needed clothes, books and personal items, but to feed their drinking, she says. It was bleak, Tina says of her new living arrangement, as bleak as it sounds. To this day, Tina feels, her grandmother’s drinking was a mechanism to try to tolerate and survive her husband’s abuse. Vladimir was an abusive alcoholic Nadya would become an alcoholic. Tina’s journey as a young girl and young teen was only beginning its harrowing and hard-to-imagine spiral as she sought to escape dangerous living conditions adjust to life on the run, in the streets and at shelters and orphanages deal with resulting personal traumas and simply survive. Vladimir drove a truck for a bread company. ![]() Tina’s grandmother, Nadya, did not work rather, she suffered health issues from years of factory work in the small village of Velikaya Znamenka in Ukraine where she and Tina’s grandfather, Vladimir, lived. My mom was going to go look for my father she never came back.” “I remember two young girls who lived in the house next door to my grandparents taking me by the arm, one on each side, and walking me to the door of (my grandparents’) house. “I was two and half, three, and I remember the day my mom put a note in my pocket and dropped me off a house away from my grandparents’ house,” the Keene State senior recalls. “And my mom, she tried to do the whole motherhood thing, but it did not work for her.” She never knew her biological father he ran off after learning that Tina’s mother, Olga, was pregnant, Tina ’22 says. Tina Clay’s earliest childhood memories are not garden variety.
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