Anya has been the mother at Safe Haven for 18 years. She worked as a helper in the home for a few years before that. In that time, she and Bogdon have had about 80 young people live under their roof. Most of those young people came to them in their teenage years, after living in the orphanage.
They have chosen a hard life, and most of these young people have a really hard time showing gratitude to Anya and Bogdon for all that they have tried to give them. Because of that, there are times when Anya, naturally, feels like she is working and working and giving and giving, and has nothing to show for it.
This past week, Anya has been really sick, while being disconnected from her husband and half of her family. She is not living in the country that she wants to be in. And there is a war. This week she learned of one more friend that has died since the war started. And we are in the middle of a dreary, grey Eastern European winter.
It shouldn’t be any surprise that two nights ago, Anya was in the middle of one of those really dark places. She couldn’t sleep just wondering and worrying about what she’s been spending all her energy on and if there would ever be any semblance of normal in her future.
As she lay there, in the middle of the night, not being able to sleep, she got a message from Dasha, a young lady who lived in Safe Haven ten years ago.
Dasha wrote about how grateful she is that Anya and Bogdon came into her life and taught her so much in the years that she lived in Safe Haven. Her life was absolutely better because she was a part of their family.
Anya was so grateful that she got this message right when she got it. “God knew that I really needed some encouragement.”
I confess that I was not as emotionally present for Anya and her struggles as I wish I had been at that moment. I’ll have to try and make it up to her, but my interest was more piqued by the fact that she had heard something from DASHA. Who … and more specifically, where Dasha is right now, makes hearing from her very interesting.
While living in Safe Haven, Dasha met a young man from Russia. When he asked her to marry him, she and Anya had several conversations about what to do. They had only spend one week together, and then started a long distance relationship. Anya’s biggest concern was that if Dasha married him she would be leaving her whole community, her best friends, and Anya and Bogdon wouldn’t be able to help her if things didn’t go well. (Unfortunately, we have seen life “not go well” for quite a few of our young people.) Dasha, however, was in her early 20s and she was in love, so she said goodbye to everyone she knew and moved to Moscow. They married, and soon Dasha was pregnant with their first child. Soon after that, she talked to Anya. Her husband, the only person that she knew when she moved to Moscow, didn’t really want a relationship. She stayed home with his mom (who didn’t like her), and he worked and hung out with his friends.
Years down the road, it seems that Dasha has a better relationship with her mother-in-law. Dasha has two kids and those kids are her world. But she and her husband aren’t close.
When the war started, Dasha was briefly in contact with Anya, and there was even some discussion of her leaving Russia with her children and returning to Ukraine, though nothing seemed possible. But when Dasha wrote, she said that she thinks that this was a part of God’s plan. She had started going to a church that had a number of Ukrainians. It was so good to be around Ukrainians again, she felt like she was a part of a community again. She was convinced that this was part of God’s plan. She was able to help them.
As Anya told me about this, I had so many questions: What was it like to be a Ukrainian in Russia right now? Were any of the people in her church people who had been forcibly relocated? What did she hear about the war? What is she doing that is helping people at her church? And on and on.
Anya reminded me that Dasha is in Russia. There are certain things that they both understand can’t be discussed because someone could be reading their communications. They were messaging on Messenger which isn’t the most secure platform.
I knew this to be true. Especially during the war we have all tried to be more careful about what we say, this is one reason I don’t use last names, and didn’t include a picture of Anya and Dasha together. I’ve read about Russian surveillance from so many different sources, and we have a friend whose brother used to work in the US embassy in Russia. She said that they could sometimes hear people breathing on their phone conversations, and their calls would abruptly be dropped if they even mentioned the name, Putin (I got the impression that they just did that a time or two just to test it out). He also had his apartment broken into the first week he was there just to make sure he got the message that there were people watching that could get to him. The people at work gave him the heads up about this.
It made sense that Dasha didn’t share too many details. People in Russia are going to jail for saying and doing the wrong things. It also made sense that Anya knew not to even try to ask too many questions. But this is one of the few people that I know living in that media sphere who hasn’t bought all the propaganda. I really wish that I could sit down and hear her whole story. Why was she up in the middle of the night (two hours ahead of us), and decided that she needed to write Anya at that time? So many questions.
In the meantime, I’m really grateful that she chose to reach out and write Anya to tell her about her life now, and just say a heartfelt “Thank you.”
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