By DAVE SCHULTZ
You should excuse Shannon Haynie if she feels she’s seen this movie before. She gave it bad reviews the first time around, and she doesn’t like the sequel any better.
Haynie was in Crimea, a part of Urkaine, when Russia invaded that region eight years ago. “It was Feb. 27 2014,” she said. “I’ll never forget that date.”
“This is deja vu for me,” says Haynie, who was in Ukraine working with Pioneer Bible Translators in 2014. Speaking of the current conflict, she said, “I felt that it was coming.”
It followed the same timetable as the Russians’ takeover of Crimea, even following the Winter Olympics.
In 2014, she decided to leave Crimea and head to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, accompanying the wife and children of a Crimean friend of hers. She was in the relative safety of the capital, and stayed at a base location for the Christian organization Youth With a Mission, but decided she couldn’t stay there. Her heart was elsewhere.
“I checked with my parents, because even though I was an adult, I wanted to talk it over with them,” she said. Her parents are Bluffton residents Tom and Julie Haynie; her sister, Jamie Vitz, also lives in Bluffton.
Finally, she said, “I felt like I had to go back. I ended up staying for another two years.”
Her place of residence at the time was the Crimean city of Simferopol, which had a population of nearly 2 million people at that time. She opted to return to the U.S. in 2016, but she has been back to Ukraine two times to visit.
When the Russians crossed the border on Feb. 24, Haynie described the moment as “very emotional” for her.
“My psyche knew it before my mind did,” she said earlier this week. “I was expecting something to happen. It was not a surprise, but on the other hand it was a great shock to me.”
She maintains friendships with several Ukrainians, and she’s been able to contact some of them since the fighting started. A few days ago, she talked to a friend in Lviv, a city of more than 700,000 in western Ukraine. “Today was one of her better days,” she said of her friend. “She wants to stay.”
Haynie, 50, now works with His House, a campus ministry at Western Michigan University. Logically enough, her speciality with the group is international students.
“I have always had a heart for missions, based on the influence of different people in my life,” she said. She traveled with a now-defunct organization known as “Adventures in Missions” when she was in high school, going to Poland when it was still under communist control. She linked up with Pioneer and went to Ukraine in 2004.
The Ukrainians she knows have been positive about the past few days, and are proud of their nation’s ability to fight back against the invaders. Haynie wants to adopt the same frame of mind, but it’s a hard task.
“I’m trying to be how the Ukrainians are — they’re standing in awe of their own people,” she said. “I never thought they would stay as strong as they have.”
She understands that the war is not going the way Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, expected it to go as the Ukrainian opposition has been strong. That brings another concern.
“(Putin) is being frustrated,” she said. “That might make him more dangerous.”
She’s also familiar enough with Bible prophecies about “wars and rumors of war,” but she takes them with a grain of salt. “I don’t let my mind go there,” she said.
She worries about the people she knows. “The Ukrainian people are very friendly,” she said.
And now, they’re the focus of the world.
daves@news-banner.com
