Sofiia Haidar is a sophomore at Heritage High school. She is attending here as a foreign exchange student; she moved to the United States from Ukraine last July. Haidar was born in the east part of Ukraine and then moved to Kyiv, Ukraine, which is the capital. “I wasn’t nervous about the moving part,” Haidar explained. “It was just school. I was actually excited because I have always wanted to move to the states.” Haidar mentioned that school in the US is much different than school in Ukraine. “There weren’t nearly as many sports, and here all the schools are separate while in Ukraine we only had 11 grades and all the schools are combined.” Basically, schools in Ukraine don’t have an elementary, middle, or high school: it’s all put together in one school. “It was very interesting when I realized that [U.S. schools weren’t] all combined,” Haidar added.
Haidar is a very kind and caring person. She has a certain effect on people: whenever you’re around her, you instantly want to smile and be happy. Even though now she seems very outgoing, whenever she moved she was “pretty nervous.” “Even though I can speak fluent English as a foreign exchange student,” Haidar said, “I was scared of not being able to fit in or find any friends.” She added, “After being here for a few weeks and getting to know a few people who were open to talk to me, I made a lot of good friends.”
Haidar always thought about what life would be like here in the US, and when she moved it was everything she expected. “I always thought life here would be like how it was in American movies,” she said. “Living in a different country and watching American movies, I always thought it would be better than where I lived.” Haidar is actually not the biggest fan of her home country: “Ukraine is actually a really bad country,” she said, and the people there are “a lot meaner” than the people here. When she arrived in the States, she said, she realized that “all the things I thought about the States were all true and it was really cool.” To sum it all up, Haidar has enjoyed it in the US and loves meeting new people.
