TIRUPATI: Christie Swarna of Chittoor district, who reached her home from Ukraine on March 4, recalled the anxious moments she faced in the war-torn country and said: “For a moment, I thought of giving up after waiting for nearly 20 hours at Slovakia border and seeing thousands of Ukrainians and foreign nationals, who have been eagerly waiting to escape from Ukraine.”
Christie Swarna is a fifth-year MBBS student at Ivan Horbachevsky Ternopil National Medical University in the east European country. The 23-year-old student said, “Though the war bells rang, regular classes continued as usual.”
“On February 24, the first attack in the Western region happened and the students in the university woke up to the sound of bombs,” she added.
“Only after the Indian Embassy officials asked us to evacuate the university. We decided to leave the country and hired around 25 buses and reached the Slovakia border at 1 am on February 26,” Christie Swarna told TNIE.
“We were exposed to minus degree temperature for nearly 20 hours at the Slovakia border. Many faced difficulty walking for kilometres to find a safe accomodation after crossing the borders,” the student said.
When asked why they chose to reach the Slovakia border instead of the Hungary and Romania borders, Christie Swarna elaborated that they had received information that thousands of students wanting to leave the country were stranded at those borders.
Now that she has safely reached her home, she urged the government to the students’ rescue as uncertainty looms large over their academic year due to the war.