Brace yourselves: This blog is 3309 words long. Honestly, I cut a lot of information out and simplified it so much to keep it short. But the story of Anya’s operation is a monster and I wanted to tell it start to finish so that you have one place to come learn about Anya and what she’s been through these past months, as well as what it has taught us about the lives of orphans here.
The core problem: Our helplessness to help Anya
A few weeks ago a friend from the states wrote me a few emails asking about Anya’s situation. At that point Anya had been in the hospital for almost four weeks … waiting. Her operation was first scheduled for the day after she was checked in, but it kept getting pushed back again and again. It was incredibly frustrating, mainly because no one in Kiev had the authority to check her out of the hospital, and so she had to stay there for four weeks..four very boring weeks.
I would have gone crazy.
Normally, the parents would have taken a child in that situation home, and just waited for the surgery to bring the child back. But Anya’s mother was only at the hospital for a total of 30 minutes during that time. My friend asked me why we didn’t just get Anya’s mother to sign a form allowing staff from the orphanage to check Anya out of the hospital. Then Doug could go get Anya and we could at least take her to do something fun.
But that’s the problem.
We don’t work for the orphanage. We don’t have any parental rights for Anya. We don’t work with any medical organization. In fact, we have no authority at all. Every day Doug would go visit Anya, and every day hospital staff would stop him and ask him why he was there; because he wasn’t a parent. And every day Doug forced his way in because he refused to let Anya think that we had forgotten about her.
We don’t have any authority. Doug’s position through this whole ordeal was to try convince everyone who had authority to use that authority to help this little girl that they wouldn’t have helped other wise. To get Anya in the hospital we needed a notarized document from Anya’s mom, permission from the orphanage, and the agreement of the doctors and hospital. None of them were hopping to help us. Doug had to spend days with Anya’s mom. The orphanage director kept changing his mind and telling us we couldn’t take her, the nurse at the orphanage apparently said that Anya didn’t even need an operation. The doctors never talked to the orphanage staff or vice versa and the mother didn’t even come down to the hospital with Anya.
Two things have been made clear to us through this whole process. 1) Having no actual authority to do something that is good and logical is incredibly frustrating, and 2) being in the orphanage system really does mean that no one cares about you.
The diagnosis
Anya has walked with a limp her whole life because of some bone issues in her hips and leg. I won’t be going into a lot of detail because I am not a doctor, and I don’t speak Ukrainian, and I don’t want to get stuff wrong. The state doctors who regularly examine the children in the orphanage have known this. Ideally, it would have been dealt with when she was about 7 so that her body could more easily readjust.
In September, one of our directors, with a team of Christian doctors from Ukraine, went out to the orphanage and did examinations of the kids. One girl was rushed to the hospital, two boys were diagnosed with fairly serious problems that would need to be dealt with, and other issues were identified in a number of kids. And when they examined Anya, they concluded that she could and should be helped. But the timing really needed to be quick because in the next year her body development would make such a reconstructive surgery impossible.
The crazy (or sad) thing is that a state doctor had been at the orphanage just a few days prior and had declared that there were no medical issues to be addressed. All the kids were healthy.
The fight
Ukraine has socialized medicine, so all health care is supposed to be free … but its not.
All the kids in the orphanage system are wards of the state, so the state should take care of all their medical needs … but they don’t.
… and so Doug spent days, weeks and months trying to arrange with the orphanage staff, parents, and doctors to have these kids examined, get them check into a hospital, and have their operations done. In the middle of all this we were working really hard to get the third floor of Smile House finished so that Doug and his family could move in and stop living out of boxes. Doug was hounding the pellet furnace salesman almost non-stop, and arranging for us to buy a wood furnace in the meantime (that whole story is here). He moved his family, we put together 3 Christmas parties for the kids in Komrivka, bought and gave out over 100 snow boots to the orphanage, and then took two Americans to some different orphanages and hospitals to give out over 100 blankets that students at their college had made. He was also searching all the time for house parents. And he's a husband and father.
Ideally, the doctors would have put someone, hopefully a Ukrainian somebody, on this project, to ensure that the surgery was scheduled in a timely fashion. But, no such luck. We are all certain that without Doug, Anya would never have had any surgery. He was tireless. When we would be driving somewhere he would stop talking to us and say, “I have 5 minutes to call this doctor and see if this Thursday Anya can come down.”
After watching him in this time, I can categorically say that Doug runs with perseverance the race that God has marked out for him (Hebrews 12:1) with a HEAVY emphasis on perseverance. He hit what seemed like brick wall after brick wall. No one returned calls, the doctors didn’t speak with the orphanage staff, the doctors would call Doug in the evening and say that they could see Anya first thing in the morning, even though he told them repeatedly he would need at least 48 hours notice to get to orphanage to agree to let her go.
In the end, I think we were the only ones who thought that it would happen.
It’s a good thing Doug has nice thick hair, because otherwise, I think he may have become bald about 2 months ago.
The wait
February 26th. Doug and Lexi went up to Komrivka to pick Anya up. It was finally happening. They stopped by on the way to pick up her mom, so that she could check Anya out of the orphanage and the plan was her mom would stay with her in the hospital. It was still morning when they got to her house, but she was already drunk. Apparently it was someone’s birthday.
We’ve had people hear about the kids in the orphanage having parents and wondering why they are in the orphanage. In general, while I’m not above criticizing the orphanage system, I try hard no to speak ill of the kids' parents or of the orphanage staff. But I daresay that throughout this story it should become pretty clear why social services don’t want Anya living with her mom. Anya’s mom was going to have to stay sober in the hospital, but she couldn’t even stay sober the day her daughter went in for a major surgery.
So the plan changed. Doug took the mom, they checked Anya out of the orphanage, and then they took the mom home. Doug got on the phone and started calling around to churches in Kiev to find someone who could stay with Anya while she was in the hospital.
That night Anya stayed with Lexi and Meisha. She couldn’t eat because he surgery was supposed to be first thing in the morning, and so the girls didn’t eat either. The next morning Lexi and Doug took Anya into the hospital to wait for her surgery. When they examined her in the afternoon, they discovered that Anya had some kind of skin irritation. The surgery was off for that day, the irritation needed to clear up first. They rescheduled the surgery for Thursday and went on their way. But Anya still couldn’t eat because they needed to do some blood tests on her … which they did at about 5 that evening.
Finally, Doug went to get some food since the girls hadn’t eaten since the day before. And the wait began.
Oksana, the caretaker Doug had found to stay with Anya in the hospital, was a blessing from God. Originally, she was only supposed to be there for a few days and then maybe she could trade out with another lady. But she and Anya became really good friends and Oksana ended up staying almost the whole time. Even when she started a job, she did everything she could to work her schedule out to be with Anya as much as possible. She also made us work on our Russian when we would visit, even though her English was quite good.
In spite of all the troubles we had before this, and even after this, God was moving. He was showing Anya a little taste of how much he loved her. Doug gave Anya a children’s Bible, not exactly a little one, but she read it fast. At first, Anya shared a room with another girl who had just had surgery. Her family were Christians and did a great job of showing love a kindness to Anya. After a while that girl was checked out of the hospital and the family that came in was also a Christian family. We couldn’t have arranged that if we tried.
The operation kept getting pushed back. The skin irritation took longer to clear up than expected, and then the doctors discovered that Anya had worms, which is probably the case for almost everyone in the villages. But every time the surgery was scheduled, Anya couldn’t eat for the 12 hours before, and she had to go through the stress of “Tomorrow, I’m going to have surgery.”
The operation
The last reschedule was set for Thursday, March 22nd but on Tuesday the 20th, Doug showed up at the hospital and they were prepping her for surgery. Apparently, the interpreter had said they day wrong.
Earlier Doug had gone out to a pharmacy and bought the surgical supplies for the operation. All the supplies. Gloves, gowns, scalpels, anesthesia medication, tubes, gauze, and even a bedpan. He had carried them on public transportation to the hospital and then left them in the room with Anya. It didn’t seem quite up to ideals of sanitary conditions, but honestly, we were all getting used to that.
So that Tuesday morning, the hospital staff put Anya on the stretcher, and then loaded all the supplies on the stretcher with her, and rolled her off.
Doug said that moment hit him like a wrecking ball. All of the work he had been doing in Ukraine for the past 9 years was encapsulated in Anya. She was why he was here, why he worked to help the kids, why we were building Smile House.
And they just dropped the medical supplies on her legs and rolled her off without any kind of acknowledgement of the gravity of all this.
And no matter how much Doug had tried to be there for Anya, as she went into surgery, she was alone. He begged a doctor to take his phone number, because if anything went wrong, who would know? The doctor agreed, and was even kind enough to call Doug after the operation.
We all prayed. A lot of you joined us. The Body of Christ lifting up this one little girl to God. Even now, its so great to think about.
And apparently, the operation went well. Better than anyone expected. But Anya’s troubles weren’t over.
The recovery
Anya is 14, and as I said before, she should have had this operation years ago. This was reinforced by the fact that while Anya is tiny for her age (as most of the kids in the orphanage are), she was a giant compared to every other kid in her ward. Most of the kids in the hospital with Anya were 7 years or younger. The older you get, the harder surgery is on your body, and the more a surgery like this one hurts. So Anya’s pain was stronger and longer lasting than the other kids'.
Plus, the Ukrainian mindset is that painkillers are a bad thing, or at least they are pretty much unneccesary. She was given medication, but not a lot, and the staff kept saying she just needed to work through the pain (this was 2 days after major reconstructive surgery on her hip and leg). As someone who has had a couple of surgeries in the past, I think adequate painkillers are much more conducive to a peaceful recovery time. But what do I know? (sorry, just couldn’t keep back the sarcasm about this issue).
Also, when Anya came out of surgery she had new roommates. A girl of about 6 with her mom, and a boy of about 4 with both of his parents. So with Anya and Oksana, the caretaker, and all the new people, there were now 7 people living in one room … with only five beds. I have no idea how this worked.
We visited Anya three days after her surgery. She had just received some medicine, so she was a little groggy. I sat with her, held her hand and tried to talk to her, but she drifted off to sleep for while. When she woke up, she was in pain. And she had to go to the bathroom.
Anya’s cast is up past her belly button, down to her right toes and stops just before her left knee, so they had to just leave a hole for her to go to the bathroom. She usually has a blanket over her legs. But when nature calls, she is lifted on to a bed pan and has to do her business.
I left the room. But I’m the only one who left the room. No one closed the door and there were no privacy curtains in the room, which means that anyone and their dog could see her do her business. That alone would have made me cry. Janna said seeing it was one of the most traumatic experiences in her life.
Anya was moaning in pain pretty regularly after that. When she did, one of the other moms in the room, and occasionally some random mom who happened to be walking down the hall, would stop what they were doing and tell her to toughen up. Doug had warned us about this, but experiencing it was utterly heartbreaking.
We all knew the surgery would be a tough time. But we hated that the strain had to be accompanied by this barrage of shame. I’ve never had the urge to punch women as much as I did that night.
And then, just across the room were two kids, with their parents doting on them. The little boy’s mom and dad were cuddling with him on a twin bed. Anya had Oksana, who was a good friend, and all of us on the team would visit her, but there's just no one like mom to make you feel better.
In the three weeks that she had waited for surgery, Anya’s mom had made the trip down to Kiev once. It would have been an all day trip. She came into the hospital and spent about 20-30 minutes signing papers, and then talked to Anya … through a window … for about 10 minutes. And then she left. Watching that whole scene play out in the hospital that night, I was struck by how lonely Anya probably felt, by how alone she was.
We stayed a few hours after visiting hours were over. Oksana asked us when we were leaving, but neither one of us wanted to go. I never wanted to leave that little girl, and I definitely didn’t want to leave her there.
A new home
The plan was after the surgery Anya would need to be housed somewhere in or around Kiev for a month. She would need constant supervision, and we wanted to find her a nice peaceful place. Doug searched around, found a nurse who just graduated school and didn’t have job yet, and was interested in helping Anya catch up on her schooling. But all the accommodations he was finding were going to be a little pricey.
The surgery happened less than a week before our March building team arrived from the States, so most of my attention was focused on that.
Then Doug asked me what it would take to get the second floor ready for people, or rather Anya, to move in as soon as the team left. It was a long list, but definitely doable, especially if I was going to have a lot of free labor from the States the next week.
After all, that is exactly why we are building Smile House … to give these kids a home.
So we kicked it into high gear. There are still plenty of those little projects that always need to be done, but the second floor is livable, and Anya has been here for a week now. She has her own room. The cast still causes her pain, but that’s to be expected, and no one yells at her when the pain in unbearable.
From her bed, she can watch DVD’s and look at the picture on the wall, but that’s about it. I decided to come up with a way to get to out of her room. So I built a rolling bed. We can take her out into the big room and she can play games or work on puzzles. From there she can see the apple orchard across the street, and if we ever have a sunny day again, we just might haul her downstairs and take her for stroll on the road.
We’re also using the chance to teach her English, because it always helps you get a job, and she does live in a house with six Americans right now.
As difficult as this time has been, we would all go through it again just to help Anya, and to be able to have her come and live with us. She graduates the orphanage in a couple of years. We all really hope she’ll be back with us then.
A little request
Anya’s operation, care and ongoing expenses are a specialty need, and aren’t being paid for by the state. If you would like to give to help offset these costs and the costs of any future medical care that the students in the orphanage or transition homes may need, please send a check to:
Manna Worldwide
4255 W. Risinger Rd.
Ft. Worth, TX 76123
and designate the check to Ukraine Medical Needs. Or you can go to www.mannaworldwide.com/donate, and designate the same way. Thank you for your prayers and assistance.
And if you would like to write Anya a little get well note, she would love it. You can send cards, letters, pictures of something cool from the States to:
The core problem: Our helplessness to help Anya
A few weeks ago a friend from the states wrote me a few emails asking about Anya’s situation. At that point Anya had been in the hospital for almost four weeks … waiting. Her operation was first scheduled for the day after she was checked in, but it kept getting pushed back again and again. It was incredibly frustrating, mainly because no one in Kiev had the authority to check her out of the hospital, and so she had to stay there for four weeks..four very boring weeks.
I would have gone crazy.
Normally, the parents would have taken a child in that situation home, and just waited for the surgery to bring the child back. But Anya’s mother was only at the hospital for a total of 30 minutes during that time. My friend asked me why we didn’t just get Anya’s mother to sign a form allowing staff from the orphanage to check Anya out of the hospital. Then Doug could go get Anya and we could at least take her to do something fun.
But that’s the problem.
We don’t work for the orphanage. We don’t have any parental rights for Anya. We don’t work with any medical organization. In fact, we have no authority at all. Every day Doug would go visit Anya, and every day hospital staff would stop him and ask him why he was there; because he wasn’t a parent. And every day Doug forced his way in because he refused to let Anya think that we had forgotten about her.
We don’t have any authority. Doug’s position through this whole ordeal was to try convince everyone who had authority to use that authority to help this little girl that they wouldn’t have helped other wise. To get Anya in the hospital we needed a notarized document from Anya’s mom, permission from the orphanage, and the agreement of the doctors and hospital. None of them were hopping to help us. Doug had to spend days with Anya’s mom. The orphanage director kept changing his mind and telling us we couldn’t take her, the nurse at the orphanage apparently said that Anya didn’t even need an operation. The doctors never talked to the orphanage staff or vice versa and the mother didn’t even come down to the hospital with Anya.
Two things have been made clear to us through this whole process. 1) Having no actual authority to do something that is good and logical is incredibly frustrating, and 2) being in the orphanage system really does mean that no one cares about you.
The diagnosis
Anya has walked with a limp her whole life because of some bone issues in her hips and leg. I won’t be going into a lot of detail because I am not a doctor, and I don’t speak Ukrainian, and I don’t want to get stuff wrong. The state doctors who regularly examine the children in the orphanage have known this. Ideally, it would have been dealt with when she was about 7 so that her body could more easily readjust.
In September, one of our directors, with a team of Christian doctors from Ukraine, went out to the orphanage and did examinations of the kids. One girl was rushed to the hospital, two boys were diagnosed with fairly serious problems that would need to be dealt with, and other issues were identified in a number of kids. And when they examined Anya, they concluded that she could and should be helped. But the timing really needed to be quick because in the next year her body development would make such a reconstructive surgery impossible.
The crazy (or sad) thing is that a state doctor had been at the orphanage just a few days prior and had declared that there were no medical issues to be addressed. All the kids were healthy.
The fight
Ukraine has socialized medicine, so all health care is supposed to be free … but its not.
All the kids in the orphanage system are wards of the state, so the state should take care of all their medical needs … but they don’t.
… and so Doug spent days, weeks and months trying to arrange with the orphanage staff, parents, and doctors to have these kids examined, get them check into a hospital, and have their operations done. In the middle of all this we were working really hard to get the third floor of Smile House finished so that Doug and his family could move in and stop living out of boxes. Doug was hounding the pellet furnace salesman almost non-stop, and arranging for us to buy a wood furnace in the meantime (that whole story is here). He moved his family, we put together 3 Christmas parties for the kids in Komrivka, bought and gave out over 100 snow boots to the orphanage, and then took two Americans to some different orphanages and hospitals to give out over 100 blankets that students at their college had made. He was also searching all the time for house parents. And he's a husband and father.
Ideally, the doctors would have put someone, hopefully a Ukrainian somebody, on this project, to ensure that the surgery was scheduled in a timely fashion. But, no such luck. We are all certain that without Doug, Anya would never have had any surgery. He was tireless. When we would be driving somewhere he would stop talking to us and say, “I have 5 minutes to call this doctor and see if this Thursday Anya can come down.”
After watching him in this time, I can categorically say that Doug runs with perseverance the race that God has marked out for him (Hebrews 12:1) with a HEAVY emphasis on perseverance. He hit what seemed like brick wall after brick wall. No one returned calls, the doctors didn’t speak with the orphanage staff, the doctors would call Doug in the evening and say that they could see Anya first thing in the morning, even though he told them repeatedly he would need at least 48 hours notice to get to orphanage to agree to let her go.
In the end, I think we were the only ones who thought that it would happen.
It’s a good thing Doug has nice thick hair, because otherwise, I think he may have become bald about 2 months ago.
The wait
February 26th. Doug and Lexi went up to Komrivka to pick Anya up. It was finally happening. They stopped by on the way to pick up her mom, so that she could check Anya out of the orphanage and the plan was her mom would stay with her in the hospital. It was still morning when they got to her house, but she was already drunk. Apparently it was someone’s birthday.
We’ve had people hear about the kids in the orphanage having parents and wondering why they are in the orphanage. In general, while I’m not above criticizing the orphanage system, I try hard no to speak ill of the kids' parents or of the orphanage staff. But I daresay that throughout this story it should become pretty clear why social services don’t want Anya living with her mom. Anya’s mom was going to have to stay sober in the hospital, but she couldn’t even stay sober the day her daughter went in for a major surgery.
So the plan changed. Doug took the mom, they checked Anya out of the orphanage, and then they took the mom home. Doug got on the phone and started calling around to churches in Kiev to find someone who could stay with Anya while she was in the hospital.
That night Anya stayed with Lexi and Meisha. She couldn’t eat because he surgery was supposed to be first thing in the morning, and so the girls didn’t eat either. The next morning Lexi and Doug took Anya into the hospital to wait for her surgery. When they examined her in the afternoon, they discovered that Anya had some kind of skin irritation. The surgery was off for that day, the irritation needed to clear up first. They rescheduled the surgery for Thursday and went on their way. But Anya still couldn’t eat because they needed to do some blood tests on her … which they did at about 5 that evening.
Finally, Doug went to get some food since the girls hadn’t eaten since the day before. And the wait began.
Oksana, the caretaker Doug had found to stay with Anya in the hospital, was a blessing from God. Originally, she was only supposed to be there for a few days and then maybe she could trade out with another lady. But she and Anya became really good friends and Oksana ended up staying almost the whole time. Even when she started a job, she did everything she could to work her schedule out to be with Anya as much as possible. She also made us work on our Russian when we would visit, even though her English was quite good.
Anya after arriving at the hospital with a gift bag Janna made
In spite of all the troubles we had before this, and even after this, God was moving. He was showing Anya a little taste of how much he loved her. Doug gave Anya a children’s Bible, not exactly a little one, but she read it fast. At first, Anya shared a room with another girl who had just had surgery. Her family were Christians and did a great job of showing love a kindness to Anya. After a while that girl was checked out of the hospital and the family that came in was also a Christian family. We couldn’t have arranged that if we tried.
The operation kept getting pushed back. The skin irritation took longer to clear up than expected, and then the doctors discovered that Anya had worms, which is probably the case for almost everyone in the villages. But every time the surgery was scheduled, Anya couldn’t eat for the 12 hours before, and she had to go through the stress of “Tomorrow, I’m going to have surgery.”
The operation
The last reschedule was set for Thursday, March 22nd but on Tuesday the 20th, Doug showed up at the hospital and they were prepping her for surgery. Apparently, the interpreter had said they day wrong.
Earlier Doug had gone out to a pharmacy and bought the surgical supplies for the operation. All the supplies. Gloves, gowns, scalpels, anesthesia medication, tubes, gauze, and even a bedpan. He had carried them on public transportation to the hospital and then left them in the room with Anya. It didn’t seem quite up to ideals of sanitary conditions, but honestly, we were all getting used to that.
So that Tuesday morning, the hospital staff put Anya on the stretcher, and then loaded all the supplies on the stretcher with her, and rolled her off.
Doug said that moment hit him like a wrecking ball. All of the work he had been doing in Ukraine for the past 9 years was encapsulated in Anya. She was why he was here, why he worked to help the kids, why we were building Smile House.
And they just dropped the medical supplies on her legs and rolled her off without any kind of acknowledgement of the gravity of all this.
And no matter how much Doug had tried to be there for Anya, as she went into surgery, she was alone. He begged a doctor to take his phone number, because if anything went wrong, who would know? The doctor agreed, and was even kind enough to call Doug after the operation.
We all prayed. A lot of you joined us. The Body of Christ lifting up this one little girl to God. Even now, its so great to think about.
And apparently, the operation went well. Better than anyone expected. But Anya’s troubles weren’t over.
The recovery
Anya is 14, and as I said before, she should have had this operation years ago. This was reinforced by the fact that while Anya is tiny for her age (as most of the kids in the orphanage are), she was a giant compared to every other kid in her ward. Most of the kids in the hospital with Anya were 7 years or younger. The older you get, the harder surgery is on your body, and the more a surgery like this one hurts. So Anya’s pain was stronger and longer lasting than the other kids'.
Plus, the Ukrainian mindset is that painkillers are a bad thing, or at least they are pretty much unneccesary. She was given medication, but not a lot, and the staff kept saying she just needed to work through the pain (this was 2 days after major reconstructive surgery on her hip and leg). As someone who has had a couple of surgeries in the past, I think adequate painkillers are much more conducive to a peaceful recovery time. But what do I know? (sorry, just couldn’t keep back the sarcasm about this issue).
Also, when Anya came out of surgery she had new roommates. A girl of about 6 with her mom, and a boy of about 4 with both of his parents. So with Anya and Oksana, the caretaker, and all the new people, there were now 7 people living in one room … with only five beds. I have no idea how this worked.
We visited Anya three days after her surgery. She had just received some medicine, so she was a little groggy. I sat with her, held her hand and tried to talk to her, but she drifted off to sleep for while. When she woke up, she was in pain. And she had to go to the bathroom.
Anya’s cast is up past her belly button, down to her right toes and stops just before her left knee, so they had to just leave a hole for her to go to the bathroom. She usually has a blanket over her legs. But when nature calls, she is lifted on to a bed pan and has to do her business.
I left the room. But I’m the only one who left the room. No one closed the door and there were no privacy curtains in the room, which means that anyone and their dog could see her do her business. That alone would have made me cry. Janna said seeing it was one of the most traumatic experiences in her life.
Anya was moaning in pain pretty regularly after that. When she did, one of the other moms in the room, and occasionally some random mom who happened to be walking down the hall, would stop what they were doing and tell her to toughen up. Doug had warned us about this, but experiencing it was utterly heartbreaking.
We all knew the surgery would be a tough time. But we hated that the strain had to be accompanied by this barrage of shame. I’ve never had the urge to punch women as much as I did that night.
And then, just across the room were two kids, with their parents doting on them. The little boy’s mom and dad were cuddling with him on a twin bed. Anya had Oksana, who was a good friend, and all of us on the team would visit her, but there's just no one like mom to make you feel better.
In the three weeks that she had waited for surgery, Anya’s mom had made the trip down to Kiev once. It would have been an all day trip. She came into the hospital and spent about 20-30 minutes signing papers, and then talked to Anya … through a window … for about 10 minutes. And then she left. Watching that whole scene play out in the hospital that night, I was struck by how lonely Anya probably felt, by how alone she was.
We stayed a few hours after visiting hours were over. Oksana asked us when we were leaving, but neither one of us wanted to go. I never wanted to leave that little girl, and I definitely didn’t want to leave her there.
A new home
The plan was after the surgery Anya would need to be housed somewhere in or around Kiev for a month. She would need constant supervision, and we wanted to find her a nice peaceful place. Doug searched around, found a nurse who just graduated school and didn’t have job yet, and was interested in helping Anya catch up on her schooling. But all the accommodations he was finding were going to be a little pricey.
The surgery happened less than a week before our March building team arrived from the States, so most of my attention was focused on that.
Then Doug asked me what it would take to get the second floor ready for people, or rather Anya, to move in as soon as the team left. It was a long list, but definitely doable, especially if I was going to have a lot of free labor from the States the next week.
After all, that is exactly why we are building Smile House … to give these kids a home.
So we kicked it into high gear. There are still plenty of those little projects that always need to be done, but the second floor is livable, and Anya has been here for a week now. She has her own room. The cast still causes her pain, but that’s to be expected, and no one yells at her when the pain in unbearable.
Anya in her new bed and new room at Smile House
From her bed, she can watch DVD’s and look at the picture on the wall, but that’s about it. I decided to come up with a way to get to out of her room. So I built a rolling bed. We can take her out into the big room and she can play games or work on puzzles. From there she can see the apple orchard across the street, and if we ever have a sunny day again, we just might haul her downstairs and take her for stroll on the road.
We’re also using the chance to teach her English, because it always helps you get a job, and she does live in a house with six Americans right now.
Janna, Lexi and I took a little break from work to help Anya with a puzzle
Anya, Megan and Marina (Anya’s nurse) enjoy a little 3D "lamp" puzzle we worked on together
As difficult as this time has been, we would all go through it again just to help Anya, and to be able to have her come and live with us. She graduates the orphanage in a couple of years. We all really hope she’ll be back with us then.
A little request
Anya’s operation, care and ongoing expenses are a specialty need, and aren’t being paid for by the state. If you would like to give to help offset these costs and the costs of any future medical care that the students in the orphanage or transition homes may need, please send a check to:
Manna Worldwide
4255 W. Risinger Rd.
Ft. Worth, TX 76123
and designate the check to Ukraine Medical Needs. Or you can go to www.mannaworldwide.com/donate, and designate the same way. Thank you for your prayers and assistance.
And if you would like to write Anya a little get well note, she would love it. You can send cards, letters, pictures of something cool from the States to:
Meisha Deane
Attn: Daniel and Janna Ross
Ivana Kudri 37A Apt. #52
Kiev 01042
UKRAINE
Hey Guys, been a while, Great to hear Anya is doing good, I'm sure she has the people now to care and love her like she deserves. Looks as though i'll be over sometime in July, looking forward to it.Let me know if there's anything you need or i can do,,take care, philip
ReplyDeleteWow, seeing the whole story all at once breaks my heart all over again. I'm so glad she is at Smile House with all of you! Daniel, that bed looks great! Also looks like she is enjoying herself...I think she should come help me with my puzzle.
ReplyDeletePraying for everyone!
Through Christ,
Brooke