Laurie and Mike Riley like to walk their dogs around their Weston, Florida, neighborhood in the evenings. The squirrels scurrying about the tree-lined paths have been an ordinary sight of the after-dinner tradition — that is, until 4-year-old Myroslav and 5-year-old Volodymyr Nemets and their parents joined them from Ukraine last month.
“The children are fascinated with squirrels,” said Riley, 52, “Apparently, they don’t have a lot of squirrels in Odessa.”
The lives of the Rileys and the Nemets came together the day before Easter Sunday through the Ukrainian Refugee Resettlement Project, a South-Florida-based, volunteer-run group that matches refugees from the Eastern European nation with local host families and helps them kickstart their lives in the United States.
