Our CEO Mark Waddington writes from Ukraine, where he has been visiting our teams to understand their progress with our strategy and its impact on children. During his visit, he’s witnessed the incredible work our teams are doing under extremely trying, dangerous conditions:
Yesterday morning I watched through the windscreen of our car as smoke from a rocket explosion drifted through the streets of Dnipro city. As an industrial centre and Ukraine’s fourth largest city, Dnipro is a regular Russian target. The attacks on it are having a grievous impact on children: disrupting their sleep and driving up their anxiety.
Some children are so traumatised that they are unable to eat, which is impacting their nutritional health and energy levels. Many more are unable to properly concentrate, affecting their education. Other problems are rising rapidly among children too, including self-harm, bullying, alcohol and drug abuse.
Our team is working across almost half of the entire Dnipro region, the largest in Ukraine.
One family among many
During my trip I met Larissa and her children – an incredible family who’d been forced to flee their home village in Russian occupied Zhaporizhzhia.
At the outset of the occupation, a delegation from Larissa’s village approached the Russian soldiers to discuss what they needed to do to ensure the safety of the community. The soldiers turned their guns on the delegation and killed every one of them. The village was left traumatised.
Larissa’s children lived through casual abuse of their community, and regular shelling and rocket attacks. The children’s father was violent, and had abandoned them. Then Larissa managed to escape from the village with her children.
When they reached Dnipro, our team connected with Larissa and helped her to buy and furnish a house for her and her children. The local community has rallied round the family too, providing fuel wood for them for the winter (one month’s fuelwood can cost half a month’s salary!), and clearing their overgrown kitchen plot – homegrown food is an increasingly important element of sustaining nutrition in Ukraine. Now Larissa and her children are settled and safe in a small village north of Dnipro, the children are attending the local school.
Our psychologists are helping them to adjust and deal with their trauma, and our social workers are leaning in to help build the capacity of the local authority to support more families displaced from the occupied and conflict affected areas.
Changing childcare systems
Every day in Ukraine our teams are helping the local authorities provide humanitarian aid and, where appropriate, prepare for recovery. They’re building new, long term child protection and care services which focus on families and communities, not institutions, as solutions.
Many children in Ukraine who’d lost loved ones or become separated from them would have been locked away in an institution. They would have been punished twice: once by the conflict, and once by confinement to an institution. Our work changing the care system here will help to put an end to that.
The gift of joy
To date our activities in Ukraine have benefited more than 100,000 children, providing them and their families with emergency humanitarian support like food and clothes, trauma counselling, and opportunities to play. Yes – play! I believe the opportunity to play should be a children’s right. Full stop.
So alongside our mobile units of specialists, we have a Miracle Bus in Dnipro doing the rounds through the villages that have very little support, to give children the chance to just let themselves fly. And bloody epic it is too!
The joy on those children’s faces stays with me on the six hour drive back to Kyiv today. Their smiles are as powerful a metric of success that we could hope for, and a reminder of the incredible impact our work is having here.
To everyone who supports our work with children – thank you. You are helping to make a huge difference in their lives.
