Letter from Founder
Two months of volunteering
I was born and raised in Rivne, a small town in Western Ukraine. I emigrated to the US in 2019, but when war broke out on February 24, I left for Ukraine immediately. I am a regular person. I didn’t know what I would do for the war effort, but I knew my place was in my country.
So, what is a war? You could never answer this question until you have felt the fear of being killed with your entire body, you hear the incessant bomb sirens and are rattled by the constant bombarding. Your brain can’t sleep.
The first week, when I arrived in Lviv, was such a shock. I saw panic, pain, and destitution. People were losing homes, families, life. But what about the kids? You know, they were smiling. They are unique beings who experienced catastrophe with a smile and positivity. It was not because they were not suffering. Were they suppressing pain? Were they trying to forget it? Did they not even know how to manage it? That burden on their small bodies was like an invisible weight trying to pull them down as they continued to try to rise to the surface.
To see children in an immigration center on the Polish border and in shelters in Lviv traveling with their mothers for 4 to 5 days to seek safety broke my heart. Over 350 children have been killed and 600 injured by Russian troops since the start of the war. More than 2000 educational schools were bombarded. How can this happen in the 21st century?
Many of the kids who survived experienced profound trauma and will have difficulty moving on and having normal lives. The trauma of war will leave a permanent scar on their lives. Thousands of kids lost one or both parents, and there are thousands of orphans living in orphanages in Eastern and Central Ukraine where the threat of war continues. These children must be moved to safer locations in Europe or Western Ukraine.
And, what kind of the future will these orphans have? How can their hearts be healed? You may not know that Ukrainian psychologists are not trained to counsel children affected by war. I started this organization to address solutions to these challenges. To build safer spaces for children, to create support systems for them, and at times to meet their basic medical needs.