My Summer in Belarus — The North Star Reports, sponsored by The Middle Ground Journal. By Mariya Taberko, Photographs by Anna Taberko

My Summer in Belarus — The North Star Reports, sponsored by The Middle Ground Journal. By Mariya Taberko, Photographs by Anna Taberko

[Photo caption #1: Statue of Yakub Kolas, famous Belarusian poet, and characters from his tales.]

Growing up as a first generation immigrant in the United States, I had developed an identity crisis about “what” I was. I certainly did not feel “American enough,” despite assimilating from the tender young age of seven years old. Yet my home country of Belarus was honestly just a string of childhood memories that consisted of going to school, watching American cartoons on the television, (dubbed in Russian, of course), and some vague visions of running through the forest, gathering mushrooms and hazelnuts. Although I always referred to myself as a Belarusian, the concept of Belarus had become a sort of abstraction in my mind.

Admittedly, it remained an abstraction as I purchased…