‘There’s got to be something else we could do’ to help
Central Florida couple travels over 6,000 miles to deliver insulin, antibiotics to Ukrainians
Ukrainian immigrants Julia Kostyuk and her husband Oleg Kostyuk have watched the Russian invasion of Ukraine in horror from Central Florida.
“My cousin was actually in the city of Bucha, and she texted me ... and she said, ‘Julia, we’re in bomb shelters. Please pray for us, we’re being bombed,’ ” said Julia Kostyuk, a family nurse practitioner in Altamonte Springs. “The first month of the war, I could hardly eat, I was so stressed for them. I felt like there’s got to be something else we could do.”
Julia Kostyuk, who moved to the U.S. from Western Ukraine in 2005, and Oleg Kostyuk, who moved from Central Ukraine in 2010, still knew many people in the war-torn country. By day two of the war, around Feb. 25, the Kostyuks were in contact with friends and family. They began raising money for gas so their loved ones could help evacuate people.
Soon after that, they got in touch with some physicians at Ukrainian clinics. They learned that as Ukrainians flee from bombs and Russian invaders, there is a subtler, often-forgotten consequence of war: a lack of reliable access to basic health care, such as insulin.
The Ukrainian medical system has all but collapsed in some areas, ripping away life-sustaining medications, according to an April World Health Organization survey. About two out of five households have at least one person with a chronic disease, the survey noted.
Residents are afraid to leave their homes for medical assistance and one out of three reported there were no longer any health care services available near them, the survey said. WHO has verified 162 Russian attacks on health care, including the bombing of hospitals, as of April 21.
“That idea just haunted me,” Julia Kostyuk said. “I spoke with Oleg, and it was just a decision within a few seconds: If we can get ahold of all these medications, let’s go to Ukraine.”
The Kostyuks turned to AdventHealth Global Missions for help acquiring supplies, said Oleg Kostyuk, an assistant professor of religion at AdventHealth University.
This philanthropic arm of the Seventh-day Adventist Church-affiliated health care system has
established satellite care locations in countries such as Honduras and Rwanda, and regularly sends medical professionals on mission trips to provide care in lower to middle-income countries.
AdventHealth Global Missions was already raising money to support Ukraine, and helping the Kostyuks was an “easy decision,” said Monty Jacobs, director of AdventHealth Global Missions.
“With the situation in Ukraine being like it was, we knew we had to be involved,” Jacobs said. “This was an opportunity for us to be able to provide someone from our community here in Orlando, to be able to directly take materials over.”
In April, the couple left their two daughters with the girls’ grandparents and traveled to Chernivtsi, a large city located in western Ukraine about an hour’s drive from the Romanian border. They spent 10 days delivering supplies and about $14,000 worth of medications, including antibiotics and basic drugs such as Advil and Tylenol, donated by AdventHealth Global Missions to Ukrainian doctors.
“They had tears in their eyes as they got the medications, because they said, ‘this insulin helps save lives,’ ” Julia Kostyuk said.
While there, the Kostyuks also visited refugee camps that house some of the 6.5 million displaced eastern, central, and southern Ukrainians who stayed inside the country. Locals donate whatever they can spare because many refugees fled with just the clothes on their back.
Every church, school, gym and household in the city that could accommodate extra mattresses is now a shelter, where entire families — save the men, who stayed at home to fight — sleep on one bunk bed each, the Kostyuks said. Rocket sirens went off sporadically throughout the day.
The most life-changing part of the trip was visiting a refugee site for orphans, Julia Kostyuk said. These kids doodled tanks in their school textbooks. After playing for hours, they’d mention they recently saw someone get shot.
“All these children, they went through so much trauma, yet they had so much joy, just smiling, and they held us and they wanted to be hugged and they wanted to be loved,” she said. “And as a mother of two children, I know that that’s what children want the most.”
The couple plans to raise money for another trip to deliver supplies to the orphanage, she said. They’ve already partnered with local organizations and gathered funds for Markham Woods Church in Longwood, a Seventhday Adventist Church that sends funds to a sister church organization in Ukraine that distributes food and resources to refugees, orphans, and those who help evacuate them, said Oleg Kostyuk.
Amid the devastation, he wants to highlight the goodness that he has observed in the people around him, particularly AdventHealth, which has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Ukraine by allowing employees to deduct donations from their paychecks.
“It’s incredible to see how we all are united with this desire to be a compassionate presence,” Oleg Kostyuk said. “The war is unfortunate to the point of [being] just nonsensical. Just — why? It shouldn’t even happen to humanity. But in spite of that, we are all united in this mission.”
For information on where and how to donate to Ukrainian relief efforts, visit Charity Navigator or the Central Florida Foundation, which have both developed lists of highly rated charities.