'There's sirens all the time': The war in Ukraine comes home to California
LOS ANGELES — The wail of the air raid siren sent her into a panic. For days, it blared through her duplex in Huntington Beach, a phone alert that signaled her hometown in Ukraine was getting bombed.
Ganna Hovey felt helpless thinking about her parents huddled in the dark basement of their apartment building 6,000 miles away, praying to make it through the night.
The ominous siren made her 7-year-old son run from his room, covering his ears. The family dog barked while their three parakeets hopped around in their cage.
Hovey turned the alert off and wrote a text to her parents: Are you OK?
No response.
It was a windy Saturday in Southern California, palm trees swaying outside her patio door. It was Day 9 of the Russian invasion, but it could be any day of the last two weeks, when her life became an agonizing loop, circling around an app that has become both savior and nightmare.
The conflict Like Hovey, many feel an overwhelming sense of despair and powerlessness. They've donated money, collected supplies to ship back home and participated in protests to call on world leaders to do more to stop Russia. But these acts feel paltry compared with the magnitude of what's happening in their homeland.
