A career in caring
Couple find their calling helping children amid the turmoil of post-ussr Ukraine
Back in the 1970s when they were dating, Mike and Sue Nardozza used to joke that they wouldn’t retire when they got old but travel to farflung lands where they would work with children.
Then they married, had two children of their own and dedicated their lives to helping children here: Mike, as a teacher of 32 years, 18 of those at St. Patrick Elementary in Pincourt; Sue as a nursing assistant of 37 years at the Montreal Children’s Hospital.
It wasn’t until the fall of 2001 after their sons were grown and retirement was looming that they heard a lecture at their West Island church about helping orphans in Ukraine did they discover the motivational springboard that brought them to their current life — and their old dream.
As the CEOs of Bearer’s of Love International, 61-year-old Mike Nardozza and 58-yearold Sue Nardozza, now both retired, are back from Ukraine where they spent much of September visiting several of the orphanages, drug rehab and homeless centres their nonprofit organization now fund.
Since founding a Dollarddes -Ormeaux charity in 2007, the Nardozzas have collected more than $340,000 for orphans and others in need in Dnepropetrovsk, a city of 1.2 million about 500 kilometres east of Kyiv and, Korosten, a smaller city 120 km west of the capital.
The money they raise has gone toward medication, renovations, mattresses, children’s shoes, books, meals and surgeries to correct cleft palates, club feet and other deformities.
“It was like a God moment,” Mike Nardozza said of the lifechanging lecture that inspired the couple. “We had heard of the need in Africa, Asia and India, but we didn’t know about Ukraine.”
“I was just hoping Mike was feeling the same way as me,” said Sue Nardozza, remembering her reaction.
She recalled how she was the first in the couple to travel to Ukraine in March 2002. She travelled with a group of Montreal women organized by her sister, Anna Rust, a Pentecostal minister in LaSalle. She painted warm and fuzzy-looking teddy bears on the walls of some of the orphanages, something she did throughout her years at the Children’s.
But she said she had to wait until Mike had a chance to visit the impoverished country, dealing with social upheaval and public health issues related to 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the fall of the former Soviet Union in 1991.
That summer, when Mike went off to run a sports camp for orphans in Dnepropetrovsk, the couple’s new career path was cast.
“It’s been a love affair ever since,” Mike Nardozza said.
“We went their on faith and we have met so many wonderful people.”
He said they often work with churches, many of which have targeted the most pressing local needs, and they have organized groups of students and others from here to do front line work.
He noted how just $5,000 — a sum that wouldn’t even pay for the average bathroom makeover in the suburbs — can pay for the renovation of an entire drug rehabilitation centre or orphanage in Ukraine, giving hundreds of children, youths and adults a better home.
“They call us Momma and Poppa when we visit,” Sue Nardozza said.
They say they couldn’t hope for more from their post-retirement lives.
“Both of us dealt with children all of our lives and we just wanted to keep on doing it, especially with children in unfortunate circumstances,” Mike Nardozza said. “It’s not their fault.”