Friday marks one year since Russia invaded Ukraine, inflicting horrific damage to that country, displacing thousands of its citizens, and killing thousands of soldiers and civilians.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Feb. 21 deplored the human cost of the war in Ukraine that has left at least 8,006 civilians dead and 13,287 injured over the past 12 months.
The toll on civilians there is unbearable, he wrote in a news release. Amid electricity and water shortages during the winter months, nearly 18 million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Some 14 million people have been displaced from their homes.
Laryssa Charest of Carnegie, who is president of the Ukrainian Orthodox League of the USA, and Courtney Robson, a program manager at DTCare, a nonprofit organization in Moon, know the reality of these statistics all too well, and they want to be sure others do, too. So they’ve planned a fundraising dinner set for 4 to 7 p.m. Friday at St. Peter and St. Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Carnegie, where Laryssa’s husband, John, has been the pastor for five years.
They’ve been working together to send donations to Ukraine since last year, but Robson came up with the dinner idea for another reason. “It became about what we could do to commemorate or observe the year anniversary, something we could do that could bring everyone back together,” she said. “Some of our donors have found other things to donate to — a factor of some type of donation fatigue. There are still ways to get involved.”
The dinner will include many Ukrainian food items, cooked by Charest with some help from church volunteers, such as mushroom soup and olivier, a Ukrainian potato salad with ham. DTCare is covering the food costs, so the $20 donation to attend will directly benefit mental health programs at Ukrainian orphanages and internally displaced persons centers. DTCare will also collect hygiene and first-aid items and offer information on its work there.
Charest said the two groups originally had considered an auction of artwork created through DTCare’s art therapy programs with children and adults in Ukraine, but the timing was too tight.
St. Peter and St. Paul parishioners have been collecting needed supplies and donations for Ukraine since the war began, she said, and it was suggested that she reach out to DTCare to ship the items overseas. The nonprofit is an offshoot of DTGruelle, a family-owned international shipping company that has been in business since 1982. The nonprofit has operated since 2019, founded to better address and expand humanitarian operations already being conducted by its president, Marco Gruelle, and his board members, according to the mission statement on its website. Ukraine was added last year to the satellite offices it maintains in Lebanon, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Panama.
Robson said that the decision was just natural. “The invasion happened on the 24th, and everyone in the office had a ‘now what’ kind of thing,” she recalled. “The brainstorming happened then. On the 25th we got the agreement to move. That was a Friday. I remember that weekend we had already ordered 500 hygiene kits for people moving into Poland.”
The challenge after that was finding partners to work with. “We didn’t have any partners in Ukraine or Poland,” Robson said. DTGruelle started reaching out to its shipping partners, too. Then she found a number online for the Scouts, called ZHP, in Poland.
Robson, a Dormont resident with three children, loved that connection because she is a Girl Scout leader. She explained what she had and shipped those kits to ZHP later that week.
“Since then ZHP has been phenomenal in helping getting our supplies there, introducing us to other reputable nonprofits,” she said. “We only work with people we can vet and trust. We want to make sure these supplies are not going to be sold or intercepted.”
DTCare has sent 31 Ukrainian relief shipments to date with more than 700 emergency first-aid kits, 17,000 essential items, 13,000 feminine hygiene products and 28,000 ready-to-eat meal packs, according to its website. Robson said Scout troops, churches, elderly care centers, hospitals and individuals collected those items and made monetary donations.
Charest said it was important to her that DTCare plans to keep its work ongoing in Ukraine, especially to help orphans, and the mental health aspect of its effort for them and all children and adults there.
Robson explained, “We are a really young nonprofit, but the goal that we have is not to just sweep in and pass out supplies and then leave. That is just helpful in the immediate term. We are working really hard to establish mental health programs in three cities.”
The first center it opened with partners is in Odesa, and the next program will be in two other cities, Irpin and Bucha, that are in close proximity to each other.
Education also plays a role in DTCare’s work. “We are teaching a college course in how mental health and art therapy helps trauma,” Robson said. “When [the college students] graduate, they will have that knowledge. We have an open studio down in Odesa so people can come in for mental health help for free.”
Robson traveled to Ukraine in November, and Marco Gruelle has been there three times. They will visit again next month.
“We try to do all of our work online and digitally, but there is a lot to be said to go there and meet people face to face,” she said. The big focus for the March trip is to visit the orphanages and see what they need and how to get those supplies and help there. “We call them endurance programs. What do you need? What do your children need?
“I think that it was really eye opening to see the people we were working with. … To see our programs have an impact on actual people. You can hear about the roar [of war] and 2 million refugees. It is easy to just read it and not realize you are talking about real people … people at the refugee centers. One of the art therapists has kids the same age as mine. They haven’t been to school, and they have to walk away [from their homes] when the air sirens go off.”
DTCare worked with Charest and her church members on a project right before the holidays, collecting blankets and socks and creating Christmas boxes for the orphans and refugee children, and other earlier efforts have included donating money to help purchase food.
“They are really fantastic partners in understanding that needs change and change quickly,” Robson said.
Charest’s son, 8-year-old Sebastian, has created his own table of Ukrainian goods, support yard signs, art pieces and other items donated by parishioners and community friends of the church. So far he has raised $3,000, Charest pointed out proudly. He’ll have some of those items for sale Friday at the dinner.
The UOL chapter at the Carnegie church is “small but mighty,” she said. It held a Souper Bowl event earlier this month, too, collecting donations from the sale of 17 different soups. That event, created by her husband, has been in operation for a decade and at Ukrainian churches without a UOL chapter.
What she loves — and wants others to know — is that all the donations the church has collected up to and including this dinner will directly benefit Ukraine. That’s because DTGruelle covers the nonprofit’s staff salaries, and the company and DTCare share an office and other administrative costs in addition to shipping all items collected.
And she emphasized, “I like that they are committed to Ukraine for the long haul. Children will be experiencing the effects of this [war] into adulthood. With something like this, you have to rebuild mentally and physically.
“We are committed to it, too. If there is anything we can do to help Ukraine rebuild, we will do it.”
Walk-ins are welcome at the dinner. The church is located at 220 Mansfield Ave., Carnegie.
DTCare will work with any group or organization that wants to collect supplies or send donations to Ukraine. It will pick up the donations or accept them at its Moon office.
Also marking the one-year anniversary
More than 122,000 Ukrainians live in Pennsylvania, according to a PennLive article from March 2022, and Pittsburgh has the second highest population — 21,184 — of them. Three local young people of Ukrainian heritage will hold a memorial marking one year of war from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Friday at Liberty Avenue Park near the Gateway T Station.
Hrystyna Petrylo, Kateryna Petrylo and Andrew Romanchik are asking people to bring traditional clothing, including vyshyvky or traditional embroidered shirts, icons, flags, banners, flyers and posters to it. They plan to sing national anthems, pray and wave those banners to remind Western Pennsylvania residents that war is still raging in Ukraine.
The three held a similar event last year at the start of the war that brought together 500 people, according to Hrystyna Petrylo’s Facebook page.
Helen is a copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but she's currently on strike. Contact her at hfallon@unionprogress.com.