Ukraine: 48 Hours and a Journey to a New Life

Source: WorldVenture, March 5, 2022

Donna and Mark McDonnel are WorldVenture global workers to Ukraine temporarily evacuated to Poland. And they just spent 48 hours straight helping Ukrainian refugees. Because sometimes, that’s what it means to serve.

Donna received a call from her friend and Arabic-language teacher, a Jordanian man teaching in Kyiv.

Donna’s teacher managed to escape with his Ukrainian wife—who was very distressed—and their two kids in their car. “That little suburb, across the street from Kyiv Christian Academy was home to a good-sized Tatar community, and he was teaching Quranic Arabic at a school there,” [she says]. It was recently shelled by the Russian military.

This man and his family traveled with different caravans of people of different nationalities and spent over 48 hours waiting to cross the border into Poland. Donna and the teacher spoke throughout this time of escape, and she helped him think through where to find a new home.

Donna [and others] arranged for lodging to house them on their trip through Poland—an adventure all its own. Eventually, the teacher and his large group made their way to Berlin, Germany, en route to their hoped-for destination of Switzerland. But the start of their new lives has begun with a new challenge: All 11 have tested positive for COVID-19. They are now quarantined. It’s a rough way to start a new life after a harrowing experience fleeing their former lives.

“They are not going back to Ukraine,” Donna reports of her friends. “He sees this as starting a whole new life. His biggest concerns were being received as a Muslim and the rumors of prejudice.”

Read the full story with prayer points.

See also Russian Evangelical Leader Apologizes to Ukrainian Christians and The Wartime Prayers of Ukraine’s Evangelicals (Christianity Today) as well as How the Ukraine War Is Dividing Orthodox Christians (The Conversation).

As the man in the next article found, sometimes having your life turned upside down can be a tremendous blessing.

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