Westport Island’s Damian Sedney has a new favorite borsch, better than that of his ancestors’ native Poland, part of Russia when they came to the U.S.

Saturday’s meal was part of a Ukrainian family’s first full day living with Sedney and wife Katrina (Tina) at the couple’s home along the Sheepscot River.

Across a river from the Ukrainian family’s hometown, war-torn industrial city Nikopol, is Zaporizhzhia, where Russia has occupied a nuclear power plant complex, Sedney said. 

He said the Ukrainian mother of two made, from scratch, a huge pot of borsch full of beef, carrots, onions, dill, cabbage and other vegetables and spices. Sedney said Polish borsch is clear, almost like a tea. Ukrainian borsch is  “really tasty” and “definitely” better, he said.

His great-grandfather’s fleeing of Russian-occupied land over a century ago adds to Sedney’s feeling for Ukrainians amid the war with Russia. “He was trying to escape Russia, just like they are” trying to escape the war,  Sedney said. “That’s a part of my family history as well, so I feel a certain amount of empathy for them being in that position, because my great grandfather was also in that position.”

Wiscasset Newspaper is not using the Ukrainian family’s names, for the safety of the family including the husband and father who remains in Ukraine, as he is within the age of men not supposed to leave because they may be needed in the war. Of the three family members who journeyed here last week, the couple’s teen son knows the most English and has been translating for everyone, as has a program on Sedney’s phone. Sedney said one person says something in their native language and the program repeats it, nearly always accurately, in the other language. So they can have a “real time” conversation in English and Russian, not Ukrainian because the program does not have it, but the Ukrainian family speaks Russian, he said. 

“We want them to feel like they are our family, not like they’re guests.” They are cooking and eating meals together, as one family, including Saturday’s pot of Ukrainian borsch. The Ukrainian family has the upstairs bedrooms and private bathroom. And the Sedneys are still using the lower floor bedroom they have always occupied. 

Wiscasset Newspaper readers met the Westport Island couple last fall. They had started a nonprofit relief program, Refugee and Displaced Persons Aid Corp. and started a website for it, www.helpeasternukraine.org; and Damian Sedney had gone to Ukraine to help deliver food and other supplies. 

Sponsoring the family is “the next big step. We’ve been supplying Ukraine, I’ve gone to Ukraine, we’ve given a lot of money to Ukraine. But this to me is kind of like the ultimate step, to have a family come and actually physically live in your home,” Damian Sedney said. Two years is the minimum and can be extended, he said. 

Due to the financial and time commitment of having a family living in their home, as one larger family, he said, for at least the next two years – helping the children enter school and their mother find work, preferably in her longtime field of accounting – the local couple will be “slowing down” some of their other contributions to the relief effort, Sedney said. 

He said of sponsoring the family, “We don’t get any money for it. It’s a big commitment” to the U.S. government, under the Uniting for Ukraine program, he explained. U.S. and Ukrainian families get potential matches through a computer program where they can read one another’s profiles and then a U.S. family can choose to invite a Ukrainian one to come live with them. Sedney found the process long and complicated, but said he and Tina were thankful the Ukrainian family was “join(ing) us for a new chapter in their lives also.”

The Sedneys knew about the Uniting for Ukraine program and “decided to finally jump in and do this” because the program is the only way a Ukrainian citizen can come to the U.S., and so many desperately want to, to protect their children from the bombings, he said.