Great news! The 88 lbs (40 kg) of Osmolite tube feeding nutritional supplements and wound care supplies that we sent in March has arrived in Kharkiv. The Kharkiv Regional Clinical Hospital received 109 packets of Osmolite and 48 tube feeding kits. We also sent wound care and dressing supplies, and that went to the Kharkiv Children’s Clinical Hospital. Once these supplies arrived in Kharkiv, they were distributed via an old friend!
Some of our donated blankets have already made it from Lviv to the frontlines in Donbass. Our contact messaged us: “The first box of blankets went to Donbass to the soldiers… they mentioned that they use them to wrap themselves in cold nights before getting into a sleeping bag. This gives them a chance to take off a wet jacket for a few hours and warm up before returning back to their shift outside.
Our child neurology colleague in Lviv shared this video with us for the Christmas season. The children’s choir Dudaryk performs a lullaby dedicated to all of the children of Ukraine who have suffered in this war. Here are the lyrics in Ukrainian and English: Спи, маленький козачок Повернися на бочок. Спи, маленький, мама засинає. Спи, козаче, кінь твій зачекає. Люлі-люлі, баю-бай. Прийде завтра Миколай, Принесе тобі в дарунок Золотих пісень пакунок.
Winter has arrived to Ukraine. For many places in the country, there are outages of heat and electricity due to the malicious attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure by its terrorist neighbor. These attacks are intended to bring maximum suffering to Ukraine’s civilian population, and we all dream of the day the perpetrators are in the dock at the Hague on trial for their crimes. But in the meantime Ukrainians are resilient.
This past weekend the eighth grade students and their teachers at the Allendale-Columbia School in Rochester NY organized a fundraiser concert for the Ukraine Medical Relief Fund. Classical musicians Katha Zinn and Illya Filshtinskiy performed on violin and piano. They presented a wonderful program, and were joined for the finale by the Allendale-Columbia student choir for a beautiful rendition of “Carol of the Bells.” Thanks to the incredible generosity of our donors, we far exceeded the initial $3000 fundraising goal for this event and all together with donations on-line, at the door, and through the student bakesale raised over $8000 that will go directly for medications and hospital supplies for Ukraine!
We are thankful for all of our many donors, and your helping hands! Since March, 2022 our donors have allowed us to complete 19 humanitarian projects, delivering tens of thousands of dollars in prescription medications, over-the-counter medications, wound care supplies, clinical equipment, and an ambulance – and we keep going strong! We will continue to stand together and help Ukraine hold the light through this darkness. No one is intimidated and we will be with Ukraine until victory.
For the past several weeks we have been focusing on logistics to get medical aid to hospitals and clinics in the area of the Kharkiv region that was liberated in September 2022. Many of the towns in the region had been under occupation since March. One such town is Izyum (population 46,000). When the russians were sent packing in September, they destroyed much of the infrastructure on their way out and left behind mass graves.