💙Your Donation Changes Lives💛

Checking in with UU recipients in Prague

This is United Ukraine co-founder Adam with your mid-week update on where your donations have helped the most. From our Sunday update through noon today, we’ve distributed an additional $5,212.64 to community leaders and families inside Ukraine. This update is a little different than normal because I’m writing it from the Czech Republic. Last week we told you about the sanctions compliance issues that affect international giving programs like ours, and I travelled to Europe to ensure that we could avoid any more unnecessary down time. These efforts were successful and our average transaction time is now even faster then before: transfers denominated in Ukrainian hryvnia now complete in an average of only 53 seconds. That means your donations start buying food, medicine, and transport less than a minute from when identify someone in need. As Arthur C. Clarke said, technology, when sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.

Consistent with our pledge that every penny donated goes to real Ukrainian families and community leaders, all travel expenses have been paid out of pocket and never with charity funds. We are committed to that pledge because we take your trust seriously, and because we know exactly how much impact every donation makes. We want you to understand that impact too. So this week, I checked in with two of United Ukraine’s first recipients: Tatianna and Masha.

Masha and Tatianna were in the eighth group of transfers we ever made, on only the 6th day of the war. These are tough women from small towns in Southern Ukraine, near the currently blockaded port of Odessa on the Black Sea. Tatianna grew up in Elizavetokva, an agricultural community with barely 300 residents. She knows how to make her own moonshine and is not shy about knowing what a pigeon tastes like. Before the war, she’d never left Ukraine and had barely left her own province. Fleeing the country was not a small choice - it was effectively unimaginable until it became necessary.

These two arrived in the Czech Republic with their collective life savings: 13,000 hryvnia, or approximately $440. Not much, but enough to get a start in a new place. But they came along with a wave of other refugees and almost no travel experience, which made them easy targets for opportunists. Upon arrival, they were given only 2,000 Czech Crowns in exchange for everything they had - or only $85. This transformed their small savings into barely enough to feed themselves even if they stayed in a shelter. Masha considered selling her phone, but knew that would effectively isolate her from everyone else she knew in the world. That’s where United Ukraine stepped into their lives - getting them enough money to make them whole, and get them back to where they started. That was enough to solve a desperate situation.

Today, Tatianna has a job preparing Czech food at a local restaurant. She’s taking classes in the local language in the hopes of improving her life in Prague. Masha is doing even better; she’s landed a job manufacturing marionettes and dolls for the Prague Children’s Puppet Theater. Your donations got them over the hump: an apartment and enough time to find jobs that were solid and sustainable. Your donations helped buy the materials Masha used to audition for her new job in the arts. Although they still think and talk about the war constantly, they have found their own their own path to making a new home. On the afternoon I spent with them, at the Alphonse Mucha Museum, they were able to laugh and tell jokes - narrating what each Orthodox saint in Mucha’s drawings was thinking based upon their facial expression.

Your donations made their lives better. It gave them a lifeline when they needed it. And now they are thriving. You made that happen, and we want to keep making it happen. The best ways to help us do that directly are:

Via Debit, Credit, or Paypal:  At this link
Via Venmo: @UnitedUkraine (under the business tab)
Our Website: http://www.united-ukraine.org

And we accept checks via mail at:
225 Bright Poppy
Irvine, CA 92618

We know there are many more like Masha and Tatianna, even though we don’t get to meet them all personally. Later that afternoon, I was walking along a row of shops in front of the National Museum and was stopped by Yana and Irina: two sisters from Kharkov.

I didn’t know these two were in Prague. All I knew is that we’d gotten them a ticket out of Kharkov more than two months ago. I didn’t even recognize them; they stopped me because they remembered United Ukraine’s work. Your donations changed their life; and they didn’t forget it. During a period where the news has been unrelentingly negative, this is the bright spot: a time when people who owed them nothing helped anyway.

Of course, we’ve continued our programmatic work this week too. You’ve helped fund a restock of critical medical supplies in Nikolaev, and helped supply groceries to families in the Zaporizhzhia region.

We also got more aid to families from Mariupol in the same week the city finally succumbed to a brutal Russian bombing campaign. That includes Lyudmila’s family (left), now in Łódź, Poland, and Oxsana’s family (right) who have set up with relatives in Tynna village.

These Mariupol families have truly been through a lot and their story is inspiring. I particularly want to highlight the Protsenko family and their 10(!) chldren.

This is the largest single family we’ve ever been in contact with, and they are in a tough spot. Depiste all that, they still insist on helping others as much as possible. As Lyubov Protsenko told me:

With our family we always have enough for life. We are used to living economically, but we send all of our extra money to Mariupol, to our loyal friends and relatives, who are not living easily now. We brought enough money on a card to survive, but we have sent all of it back home. We left everything behind. Our home, work, and possessions, we only took our children. We are not alone in this. Anything you can spare that we don’t need, we will send to families that we know have it even harder than we do.

The Protsenko’s recently welcomed their tenth child to this world: Marilina.

She’s never known a life other than one of war. She won’t have the same memories of home in Mariupol as her siblings. But she’ll still always know her parents did the best for her that they could. We’re proud to be a part of helping the Protsenko’s start their next chapter.

As always this is only a slice of how your donations help. We work constantly to identify new projects and places to help. Thank you for helping us do this. We know it means the world to the families you support.

As always, with love,

Adam