Ukraine

Two years ago, my senior year of high school, I went on a trip to Uzhgorod, Ukraine and Budapest, Hungary with some people from my school. It was my first time ever being overseas. It was a service trip, and while we were there we planned on helping out in orphanages and in some gypsy camps. The Ukraine portion of the trip was where we worked and did our services and the Budapest part of the trip was meant for us to be able to relax and enjoy the vacation.

I’ll talk about my stay in Ukraine in this post and I’ll talk about Budapest in a later post.

Train Station in Hungary

Traveling to Ukraine was the most difficult part of the trip.  We all left from Boston and it took a total of 30 hours to get to our destination.  This was including layovers, plane rides, and waiting for trains.  We flew into Germany for our first connecting flight then took another flight from Germany to Hungary.  Once we were in Hungary we had to wait three hours for our train that would bring us into Ukraine.  It was so hard to sleep on the trip and by the time we got to Uzhgorod in Ukraine we were all exhausted.

Damboki Orphanage

One of the days we were there, we went to an orphanage called the Damboki Orphanage.  It was an orphanage home to kids who most people would not want to adopt because they were considered socially unacceptable.  They all had some kind of mental disorder from anything to Down syndrome to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. While we were there we played soccer and other games with the kids.  We weren’t able to understand the kids because they spoke either Russian or Ukrainian, but that’s where our translators came in handy. Going to the orphanage was really hard and eye-opening. The living conditions were small and dirty, and we could tell that the kids weren’t very clean either.  We also noticed that all of the little girls had really short hair, and later our translators told us that it was to protect them from things like lice that often went around.  The kids loved having us there, and it felt great to be able to make them so happy in their hard living conditions.

In addition to going to the orphanage, we also had some orphans from a different orphanage who followed us around for the week. They were all girls from ages 5 to 12. We played games with them, and even though it was hard to understand them, by the end of the week we were all very close with them. It was hard having to say bye at the end of the week.

Uzhgorod is home to a lot of gypsy camps and villages, and while we were there we visited two.  This was another very eye-opening experience.  They all lived in aluminum huts with tarps, and most of the people didn’t even have shoes.  Most of the children ran around in either their underwear or torn clothing.  It was very hard to see, and my heart really went out for them.  A dance team we were with performed, and then they even performed some things that they prepared for us. The people from the camp loved watching us and also loved performing for us.  It was very hard to have to leave them and go back to our hotel where we had beds and running water.  Visiting the camp definitely made me grateful for what I have, and I try to never take anything for granted.     

My trip to Ukraine was very draining both physically and emotionally, but I’m very thankful I had the opportunity to go.