It was back in 2022 when @Paola introduced us here in OEG Connect to @Tetiana - Library Director and OER advocate at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies right after the bombing of Dnipro during the Russian invasion.
Much was spawned from this introduction, an “Open Education developments in Ukraine in times of crisis: A librarian’s perspective”, a podcast during Open Education Week 2023, a CCCOER webinar in 2025 now blossoming under the leadership of @heatherb as a full program of Open Education as Resilience.
And the connections coontinue via an update shared by Paola this year for Open Education Week:
But where do sunflowers come into this?
Through these connections I was fortunate to be invited to a 2023 online conference hosted by the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies with a theme of Library and Knowledge Management in Times of Crises. I noted in conference videos where Tetiana introduced the keynote speakers a beautiful painting of sunflowers in the room she spoke from.
The painting I had noticed in the online conference, read on to learn about the source of the image.
I am quite fond of sunflowers, having grown them when I lived in Arizona and also where I live now in Saskatchewan. From a single seed here, they grow more than fifteen feet tall, we leave the stalks and flower heads all through the cold winter here to feed birds.
I emailed Tetiana to thank her for the opportunity to be at the conference. I mentioned noticing the painting and my own love of sunflowers, sending a photo of the side of our house where they grow. She responded with photos of her sunflower garden.
Every now and then we email each other to share sunflower photos (noting that I do not speak Ukrainian and she does not speak English, but machine translation works well enough).
In one message Tetiana shared a fairytale her grandmother told her:
The sunflower thinks that the sun is its mother, because she is similar to it, she shines on it, and it turns its head towards her all day long and holds out its leaves like hands. It watches to see if she admires it. The plant turns its head… it’s a miracle.
I think of that story often as I watch my own sunflowers here in Canada. In a recent message from the end of March 2026, Tetiana shared this story of the painting I had noticed in the conference video:
Every letter from you is like a journey to unfamiliar places, to a country on another continent, into the culture of the everyday and mysterious lives of Canadians…
But in our case, this communication is like a two-tiered bridge, the upper tier (the official one) of which is OER, the lower tier (more human) sunflowers.!
Alan, I want to tell you my story, which is exactly four years old, and to back it up, I’m sending two photos. On 1 March 2022, a few days after the start of the terrible great war, my two daughters-in-law, my 10-year-old grandson and I managed to evacuate from Dnipro, which was under constant bombardment by the Russians. There were 13 of us (women, children and elderly people) in a four-berth compartment on the Dnipro–Lviv train. The train travelled very slowly (it took us 24 hours instead of 13), stopping during air raid alerts and at night in complete darkness (the lights inside the train could not be switched on). But from time to time we were shaken by explosions nearby, to the left and right of our train.
Still, we were lucky that our train wasn’t bombed and we arrived unscathed!
From Lviv we travelled on to the small town of Uzhhorod, where we had to rent a one-bedroom flat. Exactly one month later, my younger daughter-in-law and I returned to Dnipro, whilst my older daughter-in-law and my grandson stayed in the relatively safe Uzhhorod, where the mountains provide cover from shelling.
Throughout the month we spent in evacuation, to cope with the despair and longing for my sons in Dnipro, we tried to keep ourselves occupied with some form of creative work or with excursions around Transcarpathia near Uzhhorod. I worked remotely throughout the month in evacuation, providing crisis management.
It’s incredible, but our USUST academics (like me) explored their own circumstances and the possibility of continuing to teach students. The library’s assistance was both helpful and timely.
However, our inner state demanded beauty and solace. Our reflections on the terrible tragedy and our desire to stand firm, defeat the Russians and rebuild our homes and Ukraine took different forms.
My reflection and that of my younger daughter-in-law Valeria – painting SUNFLOWERS! A SUNFLOWER is one that is in love with the Sun, one that bursts with gold and affirms LIFE. And even the gloomy walls of the medieval castles of Transcarpathia seem to brighten up with the radiant sunflowers in love with the Sun.
For my family, sunflowers became a source of positivity!
And now that painting I had noticed is full not only of beauty but of this inspiring story of determination that we have found so characteristic of our colleagues in the Ukraine. I have come to understand that they typically do not want to focus on the horror of what they have lived through, and mostly prefer to focus on the work they do as educators.
So it is an honor that Tetiana agreed to let me share it with you, as she described the two tiered bridge of communications, even though we are 8000km apart on a map.
I do not know if it is the same for others, but in reading news, social media messages about the wars in our world, the uncertainty of economies, of climate, they come across at a broad level where we do not see or experience at much the human experiences of those being affected. That is why I appreciate the small bits that colleagues sometimes are willing to share in communications that bring the situations down to the lives of individual people.
And now, I have found that Tetiana and I have a common affection for dogs, but that’s another story.