Saving Ukrainian Families One at a Time
Another Commentary Coming from
An American in Ukraine
by Dr. E. C. Olson, Mission Director
…beginning with the Yalov family, one of more than a thousand “double-orphaned” families, where our dogged persistence overcame a nearly impossible set of circumstances in our four-month search for these five lost siblings, so it was no less than fate that finally brought us together in Drohobych.
Finally, after four months, one week and two days, I fulfilled
a promise I made to their Mother’s spirit
Back in March, little did I know that the video news report that I was watching would change my life as no other single trigger ever had, for in that three-minute CNN video, I witnessed how one Ukrainian family would come to characterize those Ukrainians most impacted by the unthinkable horrors caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine – and right then and there I decided that I could not just look away from this awful tragedy – neither of the tragedies – the war itself or its impact on this one family and others like them.
To understand the profound significance of this, please watch this video first:
Such was the birth of our Mission, and while I didn’t yet know how we were going to reach the thousands of families torn about by this brutal war, I decided that if I could do nothing else for the Ukrainians, I would at least try to save this one fractured family. Little did I know that this mission within a mission would take four months and traveling halfway around the world to accomplish, but when I finally met up with Viacheslav Yalov in Drohobych…
…it was as if a dream had come true.
Our smiling faces in this photo are a fitting spoiler for the end results of our four-month search that ensued after I first watched Viacheslav’s heart-wrenching video.
Sadly, the tragic beginning to their story is but one of thousands like it, as the Russians have made theirs a mission of terror, and even more tragically, most of those impacted Ukrainian families will not have this same happy ending.
For those of you who cannot view this video, here’s an abridged version of their story: With their Father killed in the opening weeks of the War, Slava’s mother did her best to take care of him and his four siblings in their home in the far southeastern region of Ukraine. One day, Slava and his mother left in search of food and other aid supplies when a Russian artillery attack ensued which fatally injured Slava’s mother, and hours later, she died in his arms.
Since the Russian attack was still ongoing, Slava could only bury his mother in a shallow, makeshift grave (in what ironically was a hole left by an artillery explosion), then he had to go home and explain to his siblings what had happened.
You really owe it to yourself to watch this video, because there you’ll see the raw, organic emotions that were overwhelming Slava as he re-told their story.
With no living relatives and all their friends either dead or being refugees living elsewhere, Slava had to borrow money to move his family to a safer area, and the government provided them with a small, one-bedroom flat in Drohobych, where we found them.
The Yalov Family’s Trail of Tears
With both of their parents dead, their home destroyed and with their village in the path of the advancing Russian army, Slava made the decision to lead his family to somewhere safer to live. That trek took them more than 700 miles to Drohobych, where we met up with them.
It was one part of this video in particular which
spoke to me the loudest – in that excerpt, Viacheslav talked about his belief that his mother’s spirit was always nearby, “…helping me, somehow”.
Right then and there I was so moved by what I was watching that I established our Mission and committed it to be that “somehow”, because halfway around the world I too felt her presence, and it was this spiritual connection that guided me all the way to Drohobych.
Last March I promised Viacheslav’s mother’s spirit that I would go find her children and make sure that they would be taken care of and have a life like what she had always envisioned for them.
But one would think – I sure did – that after traveling halfway around the world and spending four months trying to find this splintered family – that when I finally met up with them in Drohobych I thought that all the challenges were behind me. But this would not be, and in discovering this I learned an important lesson about the Ukrainian people as a whole and the plight of these Ukrainian double orphans in particular.
When Markiian my interpreter and I first met Viacheslav and offered our aid, he was at first hesitant, even going so far as asking me what I would get out of this, what I expected in return for helping him. This truly stunned me as I was totally unprepared for being asked what the motive behind my charitable offer was or being asked what I was getting out of it.
Later that evening, when we re-joined our other Mission Team Members, we discussed Viacheslav’s initial reluctance, and there I was able to understand that the Ukrainian people are above all else complex, but front and center they are a very proud people.
But pride alone was not what I felt the most in thinking back to what Slava said, so in probing deeper, I discovered that his questioning my motives for helping him and his family was more rooted in the dark side of this saga of Ukraine’s “internal refugees”, where a few evil Ukrainians take advantage of traumatized children. Without someone to look after them and without any guidance, protection or money, apparently some people who had previously approached Slava with promises of assistance were for want of a better term: predators.
But as Anatoly, the eldest (and perhaps wisest) of our Ukrainian Team Members added, “what we are seeing is more likely to be evidence of something deeper, something ingrained in our Ukrainian culture. I think what we are seeing is a repercussion of our nation being under the Russian’s thumb – and before that, under the Soviet Union’s thumb – for so long. There in that larger context one finds that Russia and before it the Soviet Union never gave Ukrainians anything of value without demanding something in return, a barter decidedly one-sided where the scales were always tipped in favor of the Russians”.
Fortunately, in our entire time in Ukraine this was the only time we encountered this dark side of the saga of Ukraine’s “internal refugees”. And whether Slava responded the way he did because of these or any number of other reasons, clearly by default he was already assuming at least part of the parental role he will be called upon countless times in the future to play – to protect his vulnerable family from those trying to take advantage of them.
But apparently my story and especially the lengths I went to in finding him allowed a small crack to form in his wall of self-defense. The more we talked, the more the crack grew wider…albeit slowly.
But I recall the one instance when that crack widened enough to let me inside of his protective fortress: during the first hour after we met, I saw where no amount of talking had thawed his defensive posture, so I turned to another approach where I first showed him pictures of my own (grown) children, and then I showed him the pictures of my five grandchildren, the youngest of which is about the same age as his youngest sister, Olivia, and they looked very similar – and judging from his slowly growing smile, he saw that too.
Then, in what would otherwise just be small informal gesture, when I posed a question, again using his full first name, “Viacheslav”, he politely interrupted me and said, “You can call me Slava”. (Markiian, my interpreter, later told me that Slava is a nickname for Viacheslav, but it means even more in this context, it was another sign of welcome into his personal world.)
Everything changed after that. The smile that I had seen none of in our first hour together was now a permanent fixture on his face, and short answers grew to become long narratives, where he began to me all about things in his world. Front and center of Slava’s life was clearly his family. So here is what is at the heart of Slava’s world – his family – the family that we are now helping – from left to right, Nicole, Slava, Olivia, Timur and Danielo.
Perhaps it was because my youngest granddaughter looks very similar to Slava’s youngest sibling, but regardless, Olivia immediately won over my heart…
…and so, if there ever is a poster child for our Ukraine Mission, for me this is that child – and how appropriate, seeing as saving she and her family were the reason why I started this Mission in the first place.
But this beautiful, little, innocent girl also serves as a grim reminder that there are thousands upon thousands of Ukrainian children who have shared the same fate as Olivia. According to latest estimates coming from the Ukrainian government, currently there are more than forty-thousand children who have been orphaned by the war.
Forty thousand. That’s nearly ten thousand a month, which makes for this shocking statistic:
On average, every day in Ukraine more than 300 Ukrainian children are left orphaned by the war.
Here’s another similar story that will tear your heart apart:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-little-girls-orphaned-by-ukraines-war
Equally appalling is the fact that since the late-February Russian invasion, an additional ten thousand Ukrainian children have been taken against their will – that is, kidnapped and taken to Russia and put in orphanages there.
Here is their story:
https//euromadienpress.com/2022/08/15russian-forces-have-seized-and-taken-to-russia-5100-ukrainian-orphans-hereasymchuk-says/
https://euromaidanpress.com/2022/07/20/ukraine-could-return-only-46-children-out-of-thousands-who-were-forcibly-deported-to-russia/
Fortunately, there are a few very reputable organizations that are tending to this grave problem, including these two:
www.ukraineorphans.org
Since I returned from Ukraine I have been keeping in touch with Slava as much as possible – which is a challenge into itself, beginning with the fact that Slava doesn’t speak (or write) English, and I don’t speak/write Ukrainian, along with the fact that the only reliable medium for communicating is by WhatsApp (internet connection in Drohobych and the majority of rural Ukraine is non-existent, same for email access, and there is no regular mail service or even FedEx/UPS)…so just to give you an idea as to what it takes to simply converse with Slava:
- Imagine needing to communicate very personal, heartfelt thoughts (and condolences) to a young man who six months ago was a relatively carefree teenager but today finds himself thrust into the role of both parents, in tending to all of the needs of his four brothers and sisters,
- and how you, as someone totally unknown, someone truly foreign to him would like to respectfully offer your help without insulting his pride and despite his serious reservations about taking gifts from strangers,
- and having to communicate this by writing, not talking, and in an entirely different dialect, an entirely, truly foreign language, and doing so where you cannot see him and vice versa, and you can’t hear him and vice versa, and you can only read what he has typed and vice versa.
Yes, it is difficult, but I am so motivated to help Slava’s family that none of this has lessened my zeal or my persistence. Not one bit. In the most recent of our weekly “WhatsApp messages”, Slava has explained to me how they had been living off donations as he struggles to juggle “parenting” and trying to find a job with a compatible work schedule so that he can be there when Nicole, Timur and Olivia finish school for the day. Like he said to me in his last letter: “I need to find out how to live all over again, because all I know is how a teenager lives his life, and now I need to learn how a parent lives his life.”
I in-turn have also told him that I personally, along with some other Mission donors would like to pay for them moving into a home or apartment that better suits a family of five (the only place the Ukrainian government could find for them is a one-bedroom apartment). I have also offered to buy them a couple computers, and to buy Slava a motor-scooter so that he can better get to and from work, and I offered to pay for a tutor to help Nicole and Timur in particular.
In all of this, we cannot forget that Slava and his entire family had nothing except for the clothes on their backs when they fled their eastern Ukraine home last March – all of their belongings, everything from their toothbrushes to their family heirlooms were either destroyed by Russia’s persistent rocket, artillery and missile attacks, or simply left behind because they could only keep what they could carry.
So ANYTHING that we can provide them, any and all will be meeting vital needs and greatly appreciated.
In what I can only see as a furthering of our connection, in his last letter Slava talked about his and his family’s future, and how he would like to someday, somehow (there’s that word again) be able to go to college in Kyiv, but in telling me that he ended the sentence with, “…but I don’t even know how to get started on that.”
So again I assured Slava that he could count on myself and our Mission supporters to help him figure that out, and that we would work closely with him to lay out the goals for his family and then figure out how to accomplish them. Please stay tuned and keep an eye out for my continued reporting on the fate of Slava and his wonderful family.
In closing I want to say that I am so proud of our Mission for accomplishing this, and in proving the near limitless Power of One, how when one person puts his mind to something can achieve incredible results. And in Slava, we have found another person who epitomizes The Power of One.
Here you are looking at a hero of mine, a courageous young man who epitomizes The Power of One.
It is nearly impossible to fully appreciate all that he has accomplished in just the past four months, but nonetheless, as competent as he is, he still needs our support.
In that respect, just think – if he was able to accomplish what he did with nothing, just think what we can accomplish with our support.
I personally, along with all our Mission supporters are honored and humbled to know Slava, and we are blessed to be in this position of assisting him and his family start their lives anew while honoring the past.
In helping him as we are, I feel that I have at least initially fulfilled the promise that I made to his Mother’s spirit back in March, to make sure that her children will be loved and taken care of just as she would if she were still alive.
Throughout this ordeal, Slava and I repeatedly called-upon her to be our higher power and guide us in the right direction – and seeing what we have been able to accomplish, it is clear that she has done all that and much, much more.