PHILADELPHIA — Janis Chakars is a Philadelphia punk-rock guitar player and college professor who was visiting Latvia in 2019 when he took a trip to the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv.
"The war had already started in the east," Chakars said last week, speaking from his office at Neumann University in Delaware County, where he teaches communications and digital media.
"[I was] sitting in a cafe and watching people go by, but with this looming presence of the war," says Chakars, 50, who lives in Roxborough, and is of Latvian descent. "So when this war started, all I could think about was watching those people, and that now they're all under attack."
