Portrait of the Youth from Youth Hub – Yashya Sobh
How love looks when you’re 15? Yashya, from Odessa: “It’s someone you hold on to tightly”
Resilience, compassion, curiosity, and their zest for life continue to teach us, day by day. Even when they make us angry, even when we scold them, and especially when they show us that the world does not go unnoticed by them. Just as they do not go unnoticed by us.
However, we have been selfish and kept them close, so close that we haven’t known how to show them to you as well, so we can learn from them together. Until now.
In their moment of teenage eternity, we captured their portraits and invite you to discover a small piece of who the young people at the Hub are – with passions, dreams, and memories.
Yashya Sobh is 15 years old and one of the young people at Youth Hub. Here, he plays pool with his friends (and he’s quite good at it) or on the PlayStation.
He is often present at activities organized outside the Hub and is the first to arrive at the Urlătoarea Waterfall in Bușteni. He answers questions in perfect English and smiles often. He doesn’t shy away from personal questions either.
In February 2022, Yashya and his family took refuge in Romania. They came from Odessa, Ukraine. They found a peaceful place in Bucharest that didn’t remind them of the war back home.
He quickly made Romanian friends among his classmates at the high school he enrolled in, where he says it’s better to attend in person than online. Recently, he passed exams at two schools simultaneously. He managed this by staying calm and treating things with a relaxed attitude.
Although he spends most of his free time at home, when he goes out, he goes to the park.
In public spaces, he stays quieter and avoids speaking Russian too much, as some might mistake him for being Russian. Sometimes he comes to Youth Hub, which he sees as a fun place. And we all know that Yashya knows how to have fun. Even when he’s not present, we often hear stories about him.
He started going out more thanks to his mother, who was looking for activities for him, and thanks to his older sister, Nadia, who has since become a youth worker at Youth Hub.
He and Nadia don’t get along at the moment, but that’s how siblings are at this age. Behind all the unfriendly remarks they make to each other, we can easily see their devotion to one another.
“I have an annoying sister”, he says, followed by an “I can’t stand him anymore” from Nadia. And even so, in the days when he was stuck in Odessa, at the hospital, or unable to cross the border because he couldn’t get a passport, Nadia could only talk about him – she was worried, even when she didn’t admit it.
About love, Yashya Offers a mature definition: “It’s about someone you’d like to spend your life with and someone you hold on to tightly”. And yes, even though he is 15, he has been in love before.
Since he’s revealing personal details, the young man says his favorite season is winter (when he was also born), his favorite color is aqua blue or emerald blue, and he doesn’t refuse a hamburger with fries.
His passion: technology
Regarding his professional plans, Yashya imagines himself working for cyber police: “Our world is more focused on technology, and cybernetics is very good these days”. If he had any superpower, it would be teleportation: “All I would have to do is visualize the place to go there”.
His attraction to technology continues: if he could change something in the world, it would be to let it discover technology earlier, so we would have flying cars by now, just as we always imagined.
In conclusion
In the end, Yashya reminisces about the happy weekend days of his childhood, when he lived in a completely different place. Back then, with his friends and his mother, they would go to the park where it was full of parents, all family friends, with their children: “That’s when I had the best fun!”
Find out more about the youth center’s activities by following our Instagram page.
