Serhiy ZavalnyukAt the time, the 16-year-old high school senior pledged to turn a room that had not seen any renovation for years into a neat and cozy place for the facility’s smaller patients to play in.
And she lived up to her pledge. Within a year, the high school student had made her ambitious project a reality. The opening of the hospital’s new playroom is planned for this week, Postovolska said.
“The hospital administration did not believe that a 16-year-old could actually do something like this, and so they weren’t willing to cooperate at first,” she recalled.
“But the room was finished, and they were so pleased that they offered me another one to remodel. Unfortunately, I am leaving Ukraine to study abroad this year, so I won’t be able to do that.”
Postovolska wasn’t the only student from KIS whose offer to perform community service in the Ukrainian capital has met with skepticism.
The work is part of their International Baccalaureate Diploma, which requires that each student complete a minimum of 150 hours on a project to help out someone else for free.
The projects must contain three components: creativity, action and service (CAS). Dan Bastien, CAS projects coordinator at KIS, said it is sometimes quite difficult for his students to carry out their projects due to the lack of a volunteer culture in Ukraine.
“When you knock on the door and offer your services, one of the first things that people ask you is: ‘Why do you want to do this?’ or ‘What is it going to cost me?’” said Bastien, adding that many Ukrainians still don’t understand how someone can do work for nothing.
“So while the main idea behind these projects is giving something back to the local community, in reality you are literally fighting to give it back,” he said.
Some projects have failed precisely because of a misunderstanding of the concept of community work, or because it was impossible to get in touch with the people who could give permission to the students to work, Bastien explained.
Some KIS students, however, succeed despite the resistance, as Postovolska’s project demonstrates.
The sixteen-year-old admits that her parents helped her finance the purchase of furniture for the room, but Postovolska also found funding on her own.
“I raised some money through bake sales, and I organized a toy drive at the school to eliminate the cost of the toys for the playroom,” she said.
When equipping the room, Postovolska also had to take into consideration the different ages of the hospital’s patients – which range from six months to 17 years old.
Upcoming plans include a book drive at KIS to make sure that her playroom has a special box with reading material for older kids.
“You know, when people see that you are really dedicated to what you are doing, they actually start offering help themselves,” Postovolska said, referring to the change in attitude on the part of the hospital administration when they saw that she was taking her project seriously.
Postovolska’s classmate Timofey Raschuk went even further in his search for project funding.
The 17-year-old wanted to organize a summer trip to Crimea for some of Kyiv’s street children, but he knew he couldn’t raise enough money in Ukraine. So he did it during his own summer vacation to the United States, selling Ukrainian souvenirs on eBay, the largest Internet auction site.
“Basically, I bought Ukrainian souvenirs, including ones from the Orange Revolution on Andriivsky Uzviz, brought them to the States, and sold them all on eBay,” said Raschuk. The young entrepreneur said he brought back about $1,000, which will go toward funding his project for this summer.
For KIS senior Mary Gerasimoska from Macedonia, the project was a linguistic challenge more than anything else.
Gerasimovska volunteered to translate the titles of exhibits and documents at the Kyiv Museum of The Great Patriotic War into English so that foreigners could make the most out of their visits to the museum, too.
“The most difficult part of the project was translating from Ukrainian, since I don’t know this language well at all,” she confided.
Gerasimoska said she had to get her friends to help her.
“But mixing with the museum staff, who are mostly elderly people, was great,” she said. “And this was the first time I’d done something on my own.”
Peeling potatoes and vegetables in a soup kitchen for homeless was not something that Aditya Menon, of India, had done before either.
“It was a really different experience,” he said. Like Gerasimoska, Menon encountered a language barrier, so he had to greet and socialize with his patrons using gestures and hand signals.
Bastien said first and foremost the community service benefits the students themselves.
“The children who go to KIS are fortunate children, so for them, helping out at a soup kitchen or spending time with homeless people is something they would not be able to experience otherwise.”
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