Story Archives / Reflections on Life in s Ukrainian Orphanage

Reflections on life in a Ukrainian orphanage

By John Hogg

It’s one thing to know. It’s another thing to see and experience. Growing up in , we’re all used to hearing about people around the world who need our help. Our mothers tell us to eat all our vegetables, because there are starving children in Africa who can’t get anything to eat. On TV, we see infomercials telling us about children around the world who need our help. Hearing this so frequently, we learn to ignore it and tune it out. Yes, we all know that these problems exist, but we only know it mentally. Only having this mental knowledge, we cannot really understand the problem. To understand, we need to see it. We need to experience it. I would like to share my experiences, in the hopes that the people reading this will be able to understand a little better, and that the fact of these precious and wonderful children, who are in need of our help, will become a little more real.

To start off, I would like to give a little background. My name is John Hogg, and I’m a 23 year old college graduate with a degree in Russian and Spanish. After graduating, I went and spent three months living in the Znamyanka orphanage in central , working with the children, and returned at the end of October 2007. It was one of the most amazing and eye-opening experiences of my life. However, before talking about that experience, I should probably start at the beginning.

You might be wondering what got me, a college-aged American, interested in working with children and orphanages in Eastern Europe. For me, the interest is personal. Five years ago, in the fall of 2002, my parents adopted two wonderful girls, Marina and Vera, from near the Black Sea. I was blessed to be able to go with my mom to bring Vera back home, and got to see her orphanage and what life was like there. Seeing the orphanage, and also getting to know my new sisters, I began to care about an issue that I had never really thought about before.

Then, in 2006, I heard about the work that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church does with CCRDF in visiting orphanages in , and thought it sounded like a wonderful way to combine an interest in orphanage work with my Orthodox Christian faith. I applied for the trip, and soon found myself as the only non-Ukrainian going with the Church to visit the Zaluchya Children’s Home in Western Ukraine. When we arrived, the need was immediately obvious and a little overwhelming. While we made good progress while we were there, but really, it was clear that two weeks was not nearly enough with those precious kids. So, I began to make plans to come back. In the fall of 2006, working together with CCRDF and with the blessing of the Orthodox Church, I returned to Ukraine, this time to the an orphanage in Znamyanka, to begin more extended work with the children.

The orphanage at Znamyanka is home to about 120 children, from ages 4 to 25, almost all of whom have very serious disabilities, both mental and physical. There are a few older kids there who are almost healthy, physically, but are there because of still wearing diapers, but for the most part, all the other kids have both physical and mental disabilities of various kinds. From the very beginning of my time living there, I was impressed both by how much the people who worked at the orphanage cared, and also by how much there was that needed to be done. Everyday, it seemed as if there were more that we wanted to do than we were able to get done, and so I had to learn to be content with doing what I could, and trying not to feel bad about what I wasn’t able to accomplish. In order to be able to do the most, my days were divided into several sections, so that I would have chance to work with all the children who have different kinds of disabilities.

Most of the mornings, before lunch, were spent working with the orphanage’s physical therapist, Tetyana Mikolaevna – performing basic physical therapy for the children who could benefit from such treatment. Although I have no background in physical therapy, I quickly discovered that what is mostly needed is not so much special training, as much as consistent individual attention and patience. Every morning, we would take the children, some of them in wheelchairs and others who were bedridden, and bring them to the physical therapy room, and spend a few hours helping them to learn to use their arms and legs better, giving them massages and different physical exercises to practice.

Then, after lunch, and after the children woke up from their naps, I spent the second half of my days entertaining the children with various activities. Sometimes, this involved reading to them, other times, working on puzzles, and still other times, simply spending time hanging out with the kids and talking to them and getting to know them. Also, at other times, besides the time that was on the schedule for specific things, there would often be chances to interact with the older kids, who, since they were mostly normal and healthy, were really eager to form a friendship and interact with peers.

Following this schedule over the course of three months, many things happened, both sad and joyful, and I was blessed to get to witness numerous positive results and changes. I’d like to highlight a few of my most important impressions from that time.

During my three months of living and working at the orphanage, I was witness to Marina, a little girl with Down Syndrome, learning to walk, and then even to run. Once given individualized attention, she tried really hard to learn and truly thrived. Love really made a big difference for her, and you could see it in her laughs and smiles. Also, another little girl who grew really dear to my heart, Nastenka, also made big strives. When I arrived in August, she was completely bed-ridden and almost didn’t move at all, besides lifting her head. I think she didn’t try very hard because she was lonely, and so she needed a reason to try. Once she started to receive consistent attention, she got much better and moving her arms and her legs, kicking them around and laughing and smiling the whole time. Also, she can now sit up if she has something to use to pull herself up, and her arms and legs, as well as her stomach muscles, are getting stronger all the time. I think, with time, she could learn to ride in a wheelchair. Who knows? Although it seems unlikely, maybe, by God’s grace, she could even walk someday? Marina and Nastenka are merely two examples of the progress that can be achieved with individualized attention and patience, but there are many other examples. More than anything, it was easiest to notice the results when hearing the squeals of laughter and seeing the smiles on the children everyday.

Second, I’d like to share a few things that were sad or hard. More than anything, it was hard to see the kids not getting as much attention as they needed in order to thrive and grow into their full potential. The orphanage director and the staff there were all wonderful and caring (I can’t say that enough! They are all great!), but financially, the orphanage just can’t afford to hire all the people that they need for the work. Each nanny at the orphanage has about 16-18 children in her care, and so she physically can’t give each child the care that he or she needs. Too often, care only involves making sure that the kids are clean and fed, and that they don’t kill each other. There is one physical therapist on staff, a musician, and a few people who work in smaller groups with the kids, trying to teach them. All of that is wonderful, and they’re getting good results, but there need to be a lot more of them. While I was there, I saw that there was always a choice to make – which kids are going to get the attention they need, and which aren’t? When I left, it was really hard, because I knew that a lot of the kids that I worked with wouldn’t be able to get that same amount of attention after I was gone. For example, Nastenka, who blossomed so much with love and attention, also grew very used to it. Although she had been lonely her whole life, laying there in her bed, it was only after I began to take her every day that she started to cry from loneliness on the days that I couldn’t take her.

Also, it was hard realizing how much work still needs to be done. Getting involved with an Orthodox young adult group (“The Way of the Fathers”), I met some students who are part of an Orthodox volunteer group called Zhyty Zavtra (www.donor.org.ua) for people who visit children’s cancer wards, which is another important part of CCRDF’s work. I went with them to visit the kids in one of the local cancer wards one Sunday, and got to meet some of the kids and their mothers. As I found out more about the group, it was wonderful to see how much they were doing to help these children, but heartbreaking to find out how much still needed to be done. In the weeks since I left , six children have died from cancer, many of whom would probably have lived if they had had access to treatments and drugs that are easily available over here in the States. Reading what the volunteers wrote about the families struggling with the deaths of their only children, it was hard to imagine, and at the same time, it made me realize how much work there still is to be done, and how we cannot stop until the problem is fixed. Progress is good, but we need to make sure that it reaches everyone.

Thirdly, I’d like to briefly touch on what people can do to help all of these children. Before doing anything else, take a moment and pray for the kids, and for all the people who work with them and help them. Then, consider helping out financially. Progress is being made at the orphanages, but there’s still a long way to go, and many essential things are simply out of their budgets. Some of the kids need special medicines or special nutritional food that is very expensive by Ukrainian standards. Also, with more funding, we could hire more people to work at the orphanages, so that the kids could get the attention they need to develop to their full potential. Try to talk to other people about it to, to get as many people as possible involved in making a difference in the lives of these children.

Also, for the children in hospitals, whether cancer wards or neonatal hospitals, consider donating supplies or money towards supplies so that the kids can receive better treatment. It’s hard enough for any parents to lose their child, but it’s much harder when the death was preventable. If we work together, with God’s help, we can help put an end to preventable deaths from treatable conditions.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, consider adoption. If you have the calling in your heart and the ability to provide a home for even one child, please think about it. This is the biggest way you could make a difference for the children of , by helping to provide homes for them, one by one. While the children at the orphanage I was at are mostly not available for adoption (although a few are), as a result of the social upheaval and high mortality rate in Ukraine, there are literally tens of thousands of adoptable Ukrainian children living in institutions around the country. Without homes, the statistics are grim. Over a tenth of them will likely commit suicide, and over half of the girls will be forced into prostitution. The average life span for these children is under thirty. We do not have to accept this as a given, and if we work together, we can help to put a stop to this. So please, at least consider and look into giving a child a forever family, or if you can’t do that, think about helping a family that is adopting with the financial burden.

As I said at the beginning, it’s one thing to know something from hearing about it, but it’s another to see and experience it. Although not everyone can actually experience what it’s like to live with these precious children, I hope that reading about some of this will help to bridge the gap a little, and bring the knowledge from the head to the heart, so we can begin to realize both the magnitude of the issue, and also, how easy it is to make a difference, even if only in the life of one child.