PROFILE: Marko Gural ’25 and Christian McKernan ’23

CONVERSE ‘We Have Friends Everywhere’

Marko Gural ’25 is a political science major with a minor in European studies. Christian McKernan ’23 is a finance major in the Mendoza College of Business with minors in European studies and constitutional studies. In early summer 2022, they undertook service learning, with grant support from the Nanovic Institute, at the Office for Refugee Support at University Ignatianum in Kraków. I n April 2022, during a conversation with their friend Max Chuma ’22, Marko Gural ’25 and Christian McKernan ’23 were inspired to undertake service learning in Europe, helping with the herculean task of receiving refugees from the war in Ukraine. Max, Marko, and Christian are all members of the Ukraine Society of Notre Dame and minors in European studies. During a spring break seminar in Berlin, sponsored by the Nanovic Institute, Max spent a day helping with the volunteer effort to receive Ukrainian refugees arriving at the city’s central train station (see p.8). Upon his return, he related his experience to his friends in the Ukraine Society. Marko and Christian decided that during their upcoming summer break, they would follow Max’s example.

For Marko and Christian, Russia’s invasion of the country of their heritage on February 24, 2022, was both heart-breaking and transformative. “I’ve been a Ukrainian longer than I’ve been an American,” explains Marko. Born in New York City to parents who emigrated from western Ukraine in the 1990s, he spoke only Ukrainian until he entered preschool. Christian is the grandchild of Ukrainian refugees: as young children, his maternal grandparents fled their homeland during the Soviet offensive of World War II. For both, the impulse to do something, to help their homeland and fellow Ukrainians, was impossible to ignore. Immediately after the invasion, the Ukraine Society escalated its activities, organizing a vigil outside of Notre Dame’s Main Building, facilitating zoom meetings between students from Notre Dame and the Ukrainian Catholic University, and, crucially, fundraising for organizations such as Caritas Ukraine and Catholic Relief Services.

After their conversation with Max, Marko and Christian worked with Taras Dobko, senior vice rector of UCU and visiting scholar at the Nanovic Institute, who helped them secure an invitation to work with the Office for Refugee Support at the University Ignatianum in Kraków, Poland. Within the first six weeks following the invasion, Kraków had received 150,000 Ukrainian refugees, a figure that increased the city’s population by 20 percent. By early June, around the time of Marko and Christian’s arrival, 50,000 remained in the city and their needs were both urgent and complex.

A typical day for Marko and Christian involved spending the morning helping with forward-planning initiatives run by University Ignatianum’s Office for Refugee Support. This included volunteering at the university’s new Education Hub, an initiative providing foreign language training – in English, Polish, or French, for example – to Ukrainian teenagers. Marko and Christian conversed with Polish and Ukrainian volunteer teachers, helping them to improve their English skills in preparation for working with young people.

In the afternoon, the students helped at a pantry near the city center where volunteers worked to meet the immediate and basic needs of a long line of refugees that sometimes stretched to the end of the block. Again using their dual language skills, Marko and Christian helped newcomers register and find what they needed from among the available food, drinks, and other essentials, such as toiletries, diapers, and washing detergent. They worked alongside Polish and Ukrainian volunteers, some of whom were themselves refugees, as well as Australians, Canadians, and Americans. The volunteers, according to Marko, were “the greatest humans imaginable, working solely to help others in that pantry.”

At the close of a service learning experience that had started with a conversation at Notre Dame, Marko and Christian’s most abiding memories revolved around conversations they had in Kraków with volunteers and refugees, including children and seniors, such as a refugee-volunteer from Odesa who had lost her home, an apartment she had worked for years to purchase, and a traumatized eight-year-old boy from Mariupol, one of Ukraine’s most heavily besieged cities. As upsetting and difficult as these encounters were, for Marko and Christian, meeting and befriending these individuals made them optimistic for Ukraine’s future and the support its people will continue to receive from friends across the globe. The experience proved to them that the Ukrainian people are not alone. As Christian explains, “now I can say for sure: we have friends everywhere.” ◆