#MicroblogMondays: Solidarity

As you all know by now, we woke up Thursday morning to the awful news that, overnight, Russia had invaded Ukraine. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am half Ukrainian-Canadian on my dad's side of the family: his mother's parents came here in 1897, to one of western Canada's first Ukrainian-Canadian communities in southern Manitoba, founded a year earlier. My teenaged grandfather arrived in 1906 at the age of 14, leaving his parents and several siblings behind. (Undoubtedly, I still have cousins there.) 

Today, Canada's Ukrainian diaspora is second only to Russia's, making up almost 4 per cent of the population. (Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is half Ukrainian, and spoke at a rally in Toronto yesterday.) Most Ukrainian-Canadians live in the western provinces. Manitoba, where I grew up, is the province with the largest percentage of people with Ukrainian heritage (14.5%).  

These days, I live in a community near Toronto that is predominantly Italian (53.5%, the highest concentration of Italians in all of Canada). But Friday morning, we were doing the housecleaning, when dh pointed out the window. Overnight, one of our neighbours in the townhouse development behind our condo building had hung a banner in the colours of the Ukrainian flag outside. (See the photo below.) I was tickled to think that there might be another "Uke" in the neighbourhood. (Or at least someone who was moved enough to make a show of solidarity, which is a wonderful thing too.) 

Hi neighbour!  :)  

If you look closely, you'll see the colours of Ukraine
flying from one of the townhouses in my very Italian neighbourhood. :) 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.