Erica S.’s “Their Homeland” is a piece I feel connected to because my family comes from Russia. After reading it, I reread the title. I loved how it represented how she felt before her trip — impersonal and disconnected from her family’s roots. The contrast it provides to the story’s end, when she leaves Ukraine and grows to miss it, is wholly welcome and very interesting to read.

I felt that she described her insecurities about going Ukraine very well and told us about how different her new school was from where she used to go in America. The disconnection she talked about at the beginning, compared to the change she experienced at the end, brought the story to an interesting conclusion. I enjoyed that the author was changed by her trip to Ukraine, and that she made friends and experiences there that she would not have been able to have had she stayed in America. She ends with a beautiful quote from Mark Twain that works perfectly to tie the piece together.