By the time 21-year-old Dasha Shareyko Dagayeva and 52-year-old Vita Dagayeva arrived at Miami International Airport on March 8, little had gone right since Russia invaded their country two weeks earlier.

Dasha, a slot machine and app designer, and her mother Vita, a chef, were fully unprepared when the bombs fell near their home in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 24. While Western media was reporting the imminent threat of Russian aggression, Ukrainian news downplayed the risk. The next day, they hastily packed the family car and drove to the Romanian border, where they waited for several days in a line of cars also escaping the conflict. Then, they drove south to Bulgaria and into Turkey before realizing they couldn’t leave their car in Turkey, so they drove back to Bulgaria to drop it off in a small town and then took a bus to Istanbul.