Last week, I sat in the Boothbay Harbor ice cream shop as a bright-eyed young woman told me she loves to pick up her cell phone and call her mother.

“If I call her and she not pick up, I think something happen,” she said.

She is Alina Pushkariuk, 28, a transplanted Ukrainian ballroom dancer working as a hostess at Harborside Restaurant, half a world away from her home and war. Beside her sits her smiling friend, Oman Eser, 31, a native of Turkey who runs the Harbor’s Ice Cream Factory.

While their names sound strange to my ears, their story is as old as humanity itself. Boy meets girl. It began four years ago in Cyprus when a smiling bell boy met a dancer and, well, you can fill in the rest of the story.

Like a lot of young Europeans, they found work outside their homeland. For them, it began in Dubai, then Cyprus, where they connected.

Eser, who likes to be called Ozzie, left to take a job at a major hotel chain in Houston, Texas. When the pandemic hit, he was laid off. After a while, some friends lured him to Boothbay, where they worked in restaurants.

Meanwhile, Alina moved back to Donetsk, a region embroiled in a war with Russia since 2014.

As the war drums got louder, she said she was not worried.

She was working in show business. Explaining the situation in tortured English, she said she moved around, going to Bulgaria, Poland, and back to Kharkiv. Politics was not on her radar.

“No one believe about it. People act like it was normal. Nobody not believe (the war) go to all Ukraine,” she said. But it did.

Ozzie said his father, a soldier who spent 35 years working for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), predicted there would be trouble in Ukraine.

He urged Alina to flee Ukraine and go to Turkey. She did and found work as a dancer. But the political climate got a bit heated as the Russian speakers turned against Ukrainian speakers.

Then on Feb. 23, it all changed. “It started to be more big,” she said.

Ozzie burned up the phone as he tried to bring her to the U.S., but he got bogged down in the complex immigration system. As the war played out on our TV sets, to say he was worried would be an understatement.

Then in April, President Biden announced that Ukrainian refugees would be admitted to the USA. Ozzie finally had some hope.

When news stories said Ukrainian refugees would be admitted at the Mexican border, he got on the phone. He asked her to come to Maine. She said where is Maine?

They decided it was safe for her to travel, so he called the airlines. The ticket prices were high, but he didn’t care. She flew from Warsaw, Poland to Paris, Mexico City and Tijuana. There, she spent three days in a refugee camp populated with Ukrainians.

After three days, it was her turn, and she presented her credentials to the U.S. border agents. They asked her a couple of questions, then wondered where she was going. She answered Boothbay, Maine. They said: Welcome to the USA.

She crossed the border, stayed three days in a San Diego hotel, then flew to Boston, where Ozzie was waiting at Logan Airport.

Since she got here, she admits everything has been a bit crazy. Ozzie agrees.

When she arrived here, the number of Ukrainian flags flying from Boothbay homes was a surprise. And as she struggles to master another language, she would love to have a conversation with someone who speaks her native language.

Still, she smiles and says she tries to make the best of her situation. "I try to be fun, but it is hard. I am trying to keep smile," she said.

After all, no one is shooting at her, and she is happy working as a hostess. But she hopes she will get a chance to dance again. “It has been my life since I was 7 years old.” And she still tries to call her mother.

For generations, our Boothbay tourist industry has attracted young people from away. More than a few of them stay.

For Ozzie and Alina, the former bell boy from Turkey and the smiling dancer from Ukraine, their story is not new.

It is as old as the harbor itself.