Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

A group of orphans jump for joy after reaching Hoverla, Ukraine's highest peak at 2,061 meters located in the Carpathian Mountains. Over 400 orphans attend the annual New Generation summer camp. Ivanka Siolkowska No child is left behind in this nationwide orphanage outreach program.

Mykola Hurayevskyi was an orphan in Ivano-Frankivsk, but having it rough in life didn’t lead him to steal or do drugs. Tall, slinky and supremely self-confident, the third-year university student is one of 16 scholarship recipients from the New Generation Charity Fund. The organization has helped 20,000 Ukrainian orphans prepare for life.

For Hurayevskyi, the path to a better future started with the fund’s summer camp for orphans.

“I remember in the seventh grade being one of the few chosen out of 200 orphans to attend a summer camp run by Ukrainians and Canadians in the Carpathians. I joined over 400 kids from every oblast in Ukraine. It was such an eye-opener!” he exclaimed.

Today the tax police major lives in Irpin, a few kilometers outside of Kyiv. He, said he was so impressed with the camp that it motivated him to study hard so that he would be chosen to attend the following year, which he did altogether five years running until he left the orphanage to enroll in the university.

“It’s not the material things we get there like clothes and footwear and all the comfort involved with the care they provide, but the chance to meet others not from my orphanage was beneficial,” Hurayevskyi said of breaking the isolation in which he lived. “I still regularly stay in touch with three people I met at my first summer camp and text message and call 12 friends I’ve met over the years.”

But life wasn’t always rosy when Hurayevskyi was back at the orphanage. Now a regular volunteer with New Generation and a camp counselor, Hurayevskyi said orphanage employees didn’t give them what’s needed most to survive in society. “The curriculum and lessons didn’t mirror reality,” he said.

“It’s as if they don’t want us to succeed, they never inform us, teach us our rights, and don’t really care about our futures,” Hurayevskyi recalled the attitudes he faced in the Ivano-Frankivsk orphanage.

Instead of enrolling in a two-year college as he was prodded to by the orphanage’s director, Hurayevskyi secretly applied to the prestigious State Tax Service University, the first to do so in the orphanage’s history, and was accepted.

Hurayevskyi, who is a baseball fanatic and enjoys teaching the sport to kids at the annual summer camp, is the kind of person New Generation would like to see emerge from every orphanage institution in Ukraine.

As of Jan. 1, Ukraine had 53 orphanages where 9,145 kids live and study; 37 for disabled children where approximately 5,000 are enrolled and 115 “children’s buildings” where children live while attending normal public schools.

In the early 1990s, when New Generation’s founder Ruslana Wrzesnewskyj first came to Ukraine to adopt a child, many orphanages she visited in Lviv and Kyiv lacked basic supplies, staff and, as she said, “the conditions were horrendously disgusting.” The Canadian registered nurse saw a girl so malnourished that she looked like an “Ethiopian child” with sunken cheeks. That prompted Wrzesnewskyj to take action and organize humanitarian aid routes to deliver goods to orphanages in all corners of Ukraine. Working first under the Help Us Help the Children banner and later in 2006 when New Generation was registered in Ukraine, her organizations delivered medical equipment, medicine, clothing, books and toys to over 30,000 orphans in over 200 orphanages. Altogether there were close to 100,000 orphans in Ukraine, according to Ministry of Family, Youth and Sports statistics in 2007.

Wrzesnewskyj and volunteers from Canada teamed up with Ukrainians to start holding summer and winter camps where orphans could engage in workshops designed to prepare them for life in the real world.

Skills such as sewing and computer knowledge, personal hygiene, conflict resolution, and rights were combined with more physical activities like skiing and other sports, along with arts and crafts and Ukrainian folk traditions like dancing and Christmas caroling.

Since 2004, President Victor Yushchenko’s administration started improving conditions at orphanages. Many today look like “private schools,” as Wrzesnewskyj said, so the group has focused on supplying other needs for orphans.

“We still do humanitarian aid routes. This year we distributed medicine, clothing, medical equipment and books to over 40 orphanages. But we’ve also added other components to our stops to teach kids HIV/AIDS awareness and about human trafficking,” said Oksana Bystrychan, a New Generation project manager.

Indeed, high school seniors who don’t attend college are the most at-risk segment of falling victim to human trafficking. New Generation also targets the teachers and administrators of the orphanages to help them improve on school administration and management and how to improve inclusive education.

While aid and training go to the most needy orphanages, often rural ones located in southern and eastern Ukraine, only the best and brightest get sent to the camps chosen by orphanage directors as a reward for good work, said Bystrychan, a former orphanage employee.

And to follow through on its mission to prepare orphans for life, New Generation offers four types of scholarships in the form of monthly payments to students who are the neediest yet who show great talent and potential.

Those who show leadership skills and display stellar academic qualifications receive $1,000 monthly stipends. Others with exceptionally strong leadership skills get to attend the annual International Youth Conference with all expenses paid. The “Conquering Disability Scholarship” are for students living with physical disabilities, strong academic skills and who want to achieve a higher education. The “working scholarship” is targeted at those who study and is meant to increase students' monthly wages by a proportion of their earnings, allowing them to focus on their studies and choose employment that is more suited to their schedules.

New Generation could use volunteers to act as mentors, camp counselors, in-kind material donations like books and clothing or medicine.

Donations can be made to:

New Generation International Charity Fund

47-V O. Honchara St., Kyiv, 01034

Telephone: (044) 484-0572;
484-0799

Account number (U.S. dollars): 260080105101.840

Account number (Euro): 260080105101.980

Account number (Ukrainian hryvnia): 26008015101.978

MFO: ProCredit Bank

Identification code: 35209456