Helping Ukrainian children to heal
Berlin woman raising money for new rehab center that will treat physical, emotional effects of the war
Anna Kobylarz of Berlin is back from her ninth trip from Ukraine to help children and moms devastated by the war with Russia, but the mission is far from complete.
After arriving in Poland, she drove through heavy snow to reach “City of Goodness,” now an orphanage, as well as a haven for women with children before the invasion.
While there, Kobylarz spent weeks holding, feeding and playing with children made orphans as a result of the war.
But she also met with doctors, hospital administrators, and other influential people toward accomplishing the overarching goal of explaining the need for a rehab center for children.
The center, now under construction, will be a place to treat the physical and emotional effects of war.
“These doctors are my heroes,” she said. “They did so much to protect children, to save children’s lives.”
Kobylarz gives as an example a 3-year-old who was treated at a hospital for a rare eye cancer, went abroad to look for safety and then came to the City of Goodness. The war had halted treatment and the girl’s cancer returned. She has lost both eyes.
With a rehab center on premises, children will be able to get treatment when they need it, Kobylarz said.
One of those helping the efforts is Dr. Izabela Marczak, a doctor at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in New York who has known Kobylarz for 10 years.
“She is a good friend of mine with a beautiful heart and mind,” Marczak said. “I am beyond grateful for Anna Kobylarz, who gives hope and helps those children giving them a better future.”
Last year the pair were going to Poland for a planned vacation, but little did they know it would, “turn out to be the beginning of humanitarian aid.”
They would encounter a child with life-threatening illness and get her the expensive medicine she needed through their friend, Andrew Sabin.
“We were extremely happy that we could help her but we knew that there are thousands of children who will seek help in
Ukraine,” Marczak said. “Anna found out about the orphans in the City of Goodness and with her bravery she went to see the place and to help more children…”
Marczak said when Kobylarz first visited City of Goodness she found, “heart-breaking stories” about orphans seeking a safe place running from war.
“She immediately started helping them with building a new orphanage and bomb shelter,” Marczak said.
Kobylarz traveled between Ukraine and Warsaw several times. Marczak said her friend Kobylarz once met a Ukrainian mother with three kids and a cat in the Warsaw train station and offered them to stay at her apartment in Warsaw.
Marczak went to meet them to find out their story and, “At night, when we were all sleeping I heard a scream, a very loud scream of a child,” she said. “At the beginning I thought it was someone from the outside but then I heard the scream over and over again.”
She realized it was one of the children screaming and when she spoke with the mother learned the kids “have started screaming after the bombs’ signals when they were running from Ukraine to Poland.”
Marczak then spoke with the children and learned they have “an acute stress disorder that will likely be a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”
Marczak said those are only two of the many stories that illustrate why it’s so important to build the rehabilitation center at City of Goodness.
“First of all, the orphans who have debilitating and life-threatening diagnosis need rehabilitation including occupational and physical rehabilitation to give them better comfort of daily living and more independence,” Marczak said. “Second, the rehabilitation center will also provide psychiatric and psychological support for children with PTSD to support their mental health and improve the quality of their future lives.”
Kobylarz has said the children of Ukraine fleeing their homes because of war are leaving everything behind — their friends, their toys, their lives — and they don’t understand why.
Kobylarz, who owns a cleaning business, is director of the Humanitarian Mission of the Polish American Foundation of Connecticut.
Dr. Stephen Noorlander, who lives in Washington state with his wife and three children, wound up helping with medical care at City of Goodness when he traveled to Ukraine last year after feeling compelled to volunteer in some way.
He wound up at City of Goodness to examine 65 children who had been displaced by bombing. Some needed medication, including for pneumonia, he said.
Noorlander, a family medicine doctor, said building a rehab center for the kids is important and so are donations because there is no “government fundin