GROWING OUR WAY HOME



Our partner in Ukraine is Alessia, a woman with enormous compassion and love for those who are suffering around her. She is a refugee herself, having fled Kyiv at the beginning of the war, and she works tirelessly to help other refugees. What we love most is her sensitivity to emotional needs as she works to alleviate fear, foster hope, and develop a sense of community among the orphans and families in her care.
STAGE ONE: HUMANITARIAN AID
At the start of the war in Ukraine, our focus was on humanitarian aid. Our project area is several hundred kilometers SE of Kyiv and is located at an important crossroads. All main routes from Eastern Ukraine pass through the area, so it was the first stop for people fleeing the front lines in the war with Russia. We provided over two hundred meals per day to refugees who had often gone several days without food, winter jackets and clothes to people who fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and assistance to help families migrate further west and to international borders. Our partner, Alessia, and her team made numerous dangerous journeys into successive hot spots to help evacuate families who had no means of transportation, and they took bandages and medicines to areas desperate for both.
STAGE TWO: AGRICULTURE & SOCIALIZATION
Ukrainian families that fled violence had access to international humanitarian aid IF they had documents proving they were from an affected area. Those families were able to register as official refugees and could move to western Ukraine where they benefited from a myriad of programs. But many families fled too quickly to grab belongings or their homes and belongings were destroyed by bombs, and war orphans simply didn’t know to grab documents. Such refugees could not access jobs, housing, food, and other aid, despite having faced the same trauma and losses. These unofficial refugees were welcomed by our community, given homes to live in (usually abandoned shacks that Alessia’s team had to renovate to make livable), and were given access to land which is plentiful in the area.
The psychological well-being of the refugees, as well as the sustainability of our small program, required that the refugees become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. So, starting in the late spring of 2022 Alessia developed an agriculture program for the refugee families. She selected the most vulnerable families – primarily widows caring for many war orphans. Each family was given 300 seedlings to grow vegetables, a nanny goat and kid for milk, and 20 birds for eggs (chickens, ducks, or geese). This program not only allowed families to feed themselves, it also brought some emotional healing to the children who enjoyed caring for the animals. One boy, holding a chick in his arms, said, “Don’t worry. I don’t have a mother either. I’ll keep you warm.” 270 families were helped with the agriculture program, and their harvests have been abundant.
Depression is a real threat to refugees because they feel displaced, socially disconnected, and unproductive. Over the winter of 2023, we gathered refugees together in groups of 30-50 for a hot meal and socialization once each week. This allowed them to establish new friendships and connections which helped them feel more rooted in their new communities. And, from the beginning, refugees were recruited to run the various programs which gives them a sense of purpose.
Closest to Alessia’s heart are the many war orphans that she looks out for – 390 of them as of early January 2023. Some of the children are partial orphans with widowed mothers and some are full orphans. Although many were traumatized by the war and couldn’t speak when they first arrived, the love and care they received from the whole community quickly brought smiles back to their faces. All of the girls and most of the boys have been unofficially adopted by families in the area. One war widow, for example, who struggled to feed her four biological children still took in another four orphans. Some boys still live on the streets – sneaking into basements to sleep at night – and Alessia does her best to befriend and care for those as well.
STAGE THREE: SCHOOL
Schools in Central Ukraine can only offer in-person classes if they have a bomb shelter. Children in small towns and rural areas such as ours struggle to attend school, yet they have no computers or smart phones that might allow them to access their classes online. We therefore set up classrooms to serve children in four locations. Officially, the students are “attending” the regional school, but we provide them the technology to access their lessons and take exams, and our teachers patiently explain the lessons.
When the children first started at the school, they were scoring 2s and 3s on their exams (on a 12-point scale). After just three weeks in our school their grades rose to 8s and 9s. In 2023, 75% of our graduating seniors scored high enough on the national exam that they qualified for free university studies, and in 2024, 100% qualified. The district administrators were skeptical of our plans at first, but now they are very enthusiastic about our school which they call the “American” school. They are even referring other students in the area. As of May 2024, we had 92 war orphans in the school with many more on a wait list.
STAGE FOUR: WESTERN UKRAINE
Alessia’s project area has increasingly been subject to air raid sirens and nearby bombings as the war effort has struggled. Fortunately, a man who used to live in the area and witnessed Alessia’s good work, arranged for her to receive a very large tract of land in Western Ukraine at no cost. A subset of her team has been working to refurbish some buildings on the land so they have a place they can move their program families if and when a safer location is needed. There is also plenty of land for farming so for now they are growing crops both in their central location and in western Ukraine. It is good to be prepared!
What is most inspiring to those of us working with Alessia is the dedication of the entire community as they care for one another. Families in the area have unofficially adopted almost all of the war orphans, so the children have loving homes and caregivers. Refugees who settled early on are caring for the later arrivals. Refugees from rural areas helped those from towns learn how to care for crops and animals. Men are using an industrial chain saw to cut and distribute firewood to help families through the cold winter months. When electricity is out (which it often is these days) there is no water, so a generator is used to run a well and volunteers distribute containers to all the families so they have water to drink. Everyone is pitching in and watching out for one another, which makes it such a joy to come alongside them and help!
