Newsletter - August 2023
Dear friends,
I was flying back to Texas together with Paul Minakov, HIM president, and Doug Stevens, pastor from Austin, Texas. I had just spent a week in Ukraine and I felt something had changed in me. It happened somewhere above Iceland, I think. I was watching a movie, and all of a sudden, I just started crying. No, there was nothing in a movie to warrant my emotions. In fact, I think I was half watching the movie anyway. In my mind, I was actually thinking again and again about the stories I’d heard and people I met in Kherson, Chornobaivka, Mykolaiv, Odessa and other places we had visited. This was my third mission trip to Ukraine since the war started, but this time it was different. The memories of this trip will live with me for years to come.
I will never forget a pastor, his head full of white hair, his large hands with rough cracked skin wiping off tears in his eyes as he said: “People are not supposed to see things I have seen... No one should pick up bodies of young soldiers who were so young, they probably never even shaved once...” With his head lowered, he kept wiping off tears. I am not sure if he was talking about Ukrainian or Russian soldiers.
Nor will I forget a teenage girl who quietly walked past the few of us. We were shown a bomb shelter in the basement of the church where at one point, over 300, mostly children, were hiding from the Russian soldiers who were looking for kids to take to Russia (thousands of Ukrainian kids are still captive in Russia, by the way). This girl was staying in this basement. Her sad, grief-stricken face! I have never seen a teenager with such a sad face. As a hospital chaplain, I remember being called into the ER room with teens looking at their dead mother. They had shock and confusion written all over their faces. This Kherson girl’s face was different - it had unspoken trauma, war, and witnessed evil written all over it. Later, the pastor of that church whispered to us that there are teens and people living in their church basement that have witnessed such horrific trauma, they have to be under close surveillance to make sure they are at least surviving their ongoing inner battles.
Speaking of the pastor of this church, I was shown a small crawl space under the concrete staircase, leading up to the second floor. Together with his wife and four of their children, they lived in that space for months under Russian occupation. He said they felt explosions and bombings of their city with their backs while hiding and laying there as the entire building was shaking and moving
I visited another church. Windows of that church are shot through but if you look through those windows from inside the church, it seems like the skies are shot through, not the windows. That church also had hundreds of people from nearby apartment complexes seeking shelter in their basement from falling rocket and bomb explosions. But bombs and explosions were not enough for the Russian soldiers. They had to fire through the church windows to prove whatever point they wanted to prove.
We were told of several babushkas sitting on a few benches right outside their apartment building entrance, catching up, sharing stories of their family members’ lives and survival. It was a sunny, beautiful day, but the Russian rocket fell out of nowhere, slicing off both legs of one of those babushkas in an instant.
I was told of a woman, standing in checkout line of a grocery supermarket. There were a few people ahead of her in the line. When the rocket came through the roof, one piece of shrapnel decapitated the man right in front of her. His body with no head fell backwards into her arms. Everything happened in a split second, but today, months later, she does not know what to do with those memories.
We met a couple from Mariupol. The wife is being treated at a local psychiatric clinic. She has had a very hard time living with the memories of what she saw. She still remembers trying to survive for months, living in the basement of their five-story apartment building with no electricity and water. Their family thawed snow to cook rats and mice, but only when they were able to find and catch them. Other days they did not eat anything. They saw a nearby apartment building get hit with a rocket, become engulfed in a scorching fire, and heard dozens of people screaming as they were burned alive. Finally, the husband could not take it anymore, and with the Russian helicopter hovering nearby, shooting indiscriminately, he ran outside with his hands up in the air, yelling and begging Russian soldiers to shoot him to end his ordeal. He has survived. Bullets missed him. He lived to bury his neighbors in the makeshift graveyard, right in the middle of the courtyard of their apartment building. And he lived to escape with four other members of his family to share this with us.
We will also never forget a farmer in the village who showed us some of the few dozens of mines and rockets and other explosives set up and left by the Russian soldiers throughout their farm fields. Vitaliy told me he had to use a handheld metal detector to search and find these mines throughout their huge farm. When we asked him how he knew how to disarm them, he said he googled it and watched YouTube videos to figure it out. Together with his parents and sister, they are back in their village, living in a hastily constructed shed, near their family’s completely destroyed two-story house, tool shed, and barn. All the buildings on the farm are destroyed, but there’s already a harvest of gorgeous bell peppers and delicious tomatoes coming. The tomatoes are amazingly delicious, I tried them. And there are roses, petunias, and daisies growing through the rubble, through and around pieces of blown-off and shot-through roof and windows. Life is back! Ukraine is rebuilding even as the war continues to decimate other parts of the country.
I took one of the most stunning images of life in Ukraine these days while visiting the city of Mykolaiv. That city stood in the way of the Russian soldiers as they tried to seize Odessa, a strategic seaport and regional center in Southern Ukraine. Some of the fiercest battles took place outside of Mykolaiv. Constant bombings decimated parts of that city. As the fire from one of those rocket explosions raged in one of the apartment buildings, it also engulfed trees growing nearby. For a few months, those trees were all black and bare. Surviving neighbors thought the trees were dead. Their bark was charred and scarred. New life, however, is coming through. Bright green leaves are growing through those scars. Life defeats death. Resurrection prevails.
More than a hundred years ago, Lesya Ukrainka, Ukraine’s famous poetess, wrote a poem with a very appropriate title in latin: “Contra spem spero”, which can be loosely translated as “Hoping Against All Hopelessness”. What was true for the Ukrainian struggle more than a hundred years ago is still true today - people are still hoping.
This is Ukraine today. Soldiers and civilians are killed daily. There is already an entire generation of emotionally traumatized children, teens, and adults. There are more people with amputated limbs in Ukraine now than there were after the First World War. We do not know how long this war will continue. However, while extremely thankful to all supporters around the world, simple people in Ukrainian towns, villages, and farms are cleaning up, disarming mines and rockets, planting fruits and vegetables and continuing to do what they do best - remain brave, hope in the face of hopelessness, and pray for the war to end very soon.
- Leo Regheta
8/23/2023
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