Sometimes, you find yourself where you’re meant to be – even if that means in Ukraine with sirens warning of possible bombs.
Jenny Kraska, executive director of the Annapolis-based Maryland Catholic Conference, had visited Ukraine for the first time in the summer of 2021 before the war, shortly after she and a friend from college had started a nonprofit to help monastic communities. She visited a community of Benedictine nuns and stayed in touch.
She had planned to return to the nuns in Ukraine a year later – and she did, although to a far different country. Both Benedictine convents had been designated as refugee centers, especially a new, spacious one outside of Lviv.
Kraska, a parishioner of St. Mary in Annapolis, was in Poland and Ukraine July 1-14.
“It was something in my heart I felt I really wanted to do,” said Kraska, who took a train from Poland to Lviv. “I wanted to hear it from the people who were living it every day.”
She was moved by the stories she heard from women, children, and the elderly who had fled the war with Russia in the eastern part of the country.
“It was really a stark moment – you hear (about) it, but to be there and see it – the family situations when they’ve lost their homes and husbands,” she said, describing one young mother with Parkinson’s disease who had three children, and grandparents from Mariupol who were caring for their 26-year-old grandson with Down syndrome. They were stories of life, told with the help of Google’s translation, “happening against the backdrop of war. It really hit home.”
Because Lviv’s railroads are important supply routes, the Russians attempted to bomb them but were deflected by missile defenses.
“It was extraordinarily jarring the first time the bombing sirens went off,” Kraska said. Equally jarring was traveling into downtown Lviv and seeing the paintings and statues of the cathedral and other buildings swathed in boards and metal in an attempt to protect them.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like to walk through D.C. or Annapolis and see it boarded up,” she said. “To know you live in that kind of fear of what might happen.”
But she was struck by the resiliency of people who lost everything, especially seeing them quickly build community in the refugee center. They were growing vegetables, cooking, cleaning and teaching the children.
“These were people who had nothing but are establishing a community life and making sure their kids are still getting lessons,” she said.
While at the refugee center, she asked what was most needed, and the people told her fresh fruit. Kraska went to a market and bought apples and bananas, and “you would have thought I gave them a million dollars.”
She also wasn’t prepared for the outpouring of support and gratitude she received. The Ukrainian people are being bombarded with demoralizing propaganda by the Russians, telling them that they are Nazis and the Russians are trying to rid the country of Nazis.
“They’re grateful we are standing with them,” Kraska said.
The Archdiocese of Lviv is building a sturdy, brick refugee center for women and children whose homes have been bombed in regions no longer safe.
“The Catholic Church, which it does so wonderfully, is stepping up to help everyone of every faith and tradition,” said Kraska, who toured the facility and met Archbishop Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki of Lviv. “The church is doing something tangible.”
So is Kraska, who was so moved that she created a Go Fund Me page, https://gofund.me/d1815e4b with a goal of raising $150,000 to help complete it.
When it came time to return, Archbishop Mokrzycki told Kraska he would take her to a Knights of Columbus picnic – he was the first Knight in Ukraine, and the Knights of Columbus have been integral in helping the refugees – and then he would drive her over the border into Poland because he has a diplomatic passport.
After the picnic, she rode with the archbishop and his press secretary across the border, skipping the lines, and they handed her over to a Knight of Columbus, who drove her the rest of the way to the airport in Krakow.
“It was only because God is making this all work,” Kraska said.
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