Between Two Homes
By Assia Satella and Oleksandr Ladyzhenskyi
Ever since I was a child, I had just one dream – to become a professional footballer. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, my family decided that I should move to Britain. It was an incredible opportunity to test myself in the world’s most football-loving country.
It was one of the most difficult periods of my life. The familiar Ukrainian greeting «Доброго ранку!» gave way to “Good morning!”, and the familiar paths I used to take to the football pitch were replaced by entirely new and unfamiliar roads.
In England, we were welcomed by our sponsors, Neil and Denise, who had agreed to provide us with rooms to live in as we settled into a new country. They did everything they could to make us feel at home. Unfortunately, we lived in a village with only five buses a day to the nearest small town.
We had no friends or acquaintances nearby. We felt cut off from the rest of the world and very lonely. My only refuge was the football pitch in town. It was a place where I could forget all my problems and feel as though I was back in Ukraine, playing football with my friends.
My family and our sponsors began looking for a team where I could continue training. Eventually, a coach named Josh called Neil and invited me to train with Paulton Rovers U18. In September 2022, I also started college.
The team made me feel very welcome, and I became one of its leaders. At college, however, the English students had their own groups, and I found it very difficult to make friends. They had their own jokes, ways of communicating and topics of conversation, which made it hard for me to join in. In general, they treated me very well, but I still felt like an outsider. Playing football after classes was the only thing that kept my spirits up.
After finishing college and moving on from the U18 team, I enrolled at the University of the West of England, where I found a Ukrainian community.
Unfortunately, around this time, I began suffering frequent injuries. I often found myself alone, unable to do what I loved – play football, which had always kept me going. My injuries meant I had to focus on treatment and recovery.
That was when I started looking for people who shared my background – Ukrainians I could get to know, talk to and enjoy spending time with. This was how I came across the Ukrainian society UWE UkrSoc, where I met some truly lovely, fun people whose company I enjoyed immensely.
While recovering from my injuries, I found myself in teams where I felt like an outsider and struggled to fit in. The coaches did not have confidence in me or give me enough playing time, and my relationships with the other players were not going particularly well. This left me feeling lonely and isolated once again. I just wanted to get back to enjoying what I loved.
I returned to Ukraine for the first time in four years and saw my family and friends. I played football on my old pitches again, but home no longer felt quite the way I remembered it. The people around me had changed, and so had I.
Over the first week or so back home, I gradually got used to the idea that I really had returned to the place where I had grown up, gone to school, first learnt to kick a ball and simply enjoyed life. I began to feel truly at home again. At the same time, I knew I had to fulfil my lifelong dream. It was then that I understood more clearly than ever that I was in Britain for a reason – to make that dream come true.
Eventually, I realised that home is more than just the place where you live. It can be wherever you feel comfortable, where you have people around you who support you, and where you can be yourself. But for me, my true home will always be the place where I feel at peace.
Ukraine will always be where my story began, while Britain has become the place where I continue to write it and work towards my goal.
