Within the Platform of Goodness project, the editorial staff of Platfor.ma online magazine pay visits to worthy projects, personally help their causes, and write pieces about their experience to raise awareness of important initiatives and show people that helping others is easy. This time we visited Dacha, a newly built center for children with cancer. This is a project of the Zaporuka Foundation, which in the times of war not only increased the amount of its usual aid to hospitals and their patients, but also became a large-scale humanitarian headquarters supporting internally displaced families.
🇺🇦 Text in Ukrainian is available here🇺🇦
The Dacha project has been working for 14 years already. One of their most notable projects is a large rented house in Kyiv, which over the years managed to become a temporary home for 1,400 families of children with cancer. Here they could live to avoid the need to constantly stay in hospital while having their family live with them. However, a rented house is a rented house. Therefore, considering all its experience, Zaporuka built its own Dacha in the private sector 20 minutes away from the center of Kyiv.
“If it weren’t for February 24, we would have already settled here. Unfortunately, we had to stop construction for a while — four months actually. But despite all the risks, in July we decided that we have to finish everything,” President of the Foundation Natalia Onipko begins the tour.
Outside, Dacha looks like a stylish two-story estate — it has been designed by the famous Makhno Studio, which had won a bunch of prestigious international awards. But now, construction of the almost finished building is frozen. Brand new appliances and disassembled furniture have not yet been unpacked. It is only the aid kits and humanitarian aid, occupying almost the entire first floor, half-finished drawings on the walls with still fresh, wet paint, and the smell of fresh renovations that suggest that the space is alive.
For Dacha not to stand idle, it was turned into a kind of humanitarian aid warehouse. Nothing stays here for long but is immediately sent to where it is needed. Zaporuka supports families of migrants in Kyiv, Cherkasy, and Poltava regions.
Two Natalias
We put the tour on a pause to load 200 hygiene kits to be sent to Zolotonosha as soon as possible, and simultaneously get to know another Natalia — Piskova, who is responsible for compiling lists of aid and its delivery, as well as for other organizational and coordination issues.
The two Natalias found each other via social networks. Zaporuka needed proven volunteers on the ground who know the displaced people personally and indeed help them, and Natalia Piskova is just the person. In her hometown of Korsun-Shevchenkivskyi, she founded the Rota Turboty (lit. Company of Care) community, which has been operating for almost seven months already.
One of the first visitors to Rota Turboty was Vadym from Bucha. On March 19, his daughter was born, already in Korsun. For two weeks before that, he and his wife stayed in the basement. Though they were planning a different name, they named the girl Bohdana. Bohdana has been growing on baby food from Rota Turboty, because only one brand suited her. So every time they have received these jars, they put them aside for her.
“I was holding her in my arms almost the moment she was born. For me, Bohdana is quite a symbol of Rota Turboty, for she was born in Korsun, during the war, and her father was second [after me] to see her. Now there are these talks of nuclear families and that it takes a whole village to raise a child, and in our case that was it — we’ve had a whole volunteer village to raise this child,” recalls Natalia.
So when a fateful tag in comments brought them together, both Natalias set off to investigate who else could be helped.
“Now we deliver aid over long distances and to small towns — Monastyryshche, Zolotonosha, Samoridnia, to places that volunteers generally don’t reach, for they tend to go to regional centers. There, they deliver aid somewhere to the city council and that’s it — the work’s done,” explains the head of Zaporuka.
The Foundation helps with products, hygiene items, and other necessary things. The aid is collected using brand contacts. For example, one of the international cosmetics companies provided several hundred large hygiene kits, 200 of which are sent to Zolotonosha. The bus driver delivering all this was found via Twitter — he responded to Natalias’ request for help.
Among the volunteers’ next steps is helping the displaced persons survive the winter. This means buying warm blankets, heaters, and the most requested thing — firewood — all of which Zaporuka has already started purchasing.
They strive to attract funds for this abroad, as they believe that current domestic Ukrainian donations should mostly go to the Armed Forces. So, until the end of the year, they plan to purchase goods in Ukraine, but spend foreign donors’ money.
“A lot of foreign funds came to Ukraine, but they didn’t reach Ukrainian organizations, because, unfortunately, the latter had no experience in working with donors. Meanwhile, Zaporuka has constantly worked with international funds, and we know how to do this. Therefore, we decided that we should help them spend those funds correctly and where needed.”
A Mad Evacuation
Humanitarian aid to displaced persons is only one sphere of Zaporuka’s activities. Until February 24, the Foundation regularly helped three hospitals — now there are 14 of them.
“That’s a big piece of work — we are now taking on a project for the rehabilitation of injured children. We’re purchasing equipment, training rehabilitation doctors, for we’ve got this experience. In the medical field, we are experts indeed, we do everything automatically, we know how to purchase equipment, we know how to do everything.”
However, even with such experience, some things had to be learned on the go, for example, to evacuate children with cancer during the full-scale war. On February 24, there were nine families still living at the old Dacha.
“As you can remember, on that day [February 24], no one understood whether it was for long or not. We’re friends with Serhii Prytula, so I called him and said: ‘Serhii, we have 30 people at Dacha. What should we do?’ And he replied: ‘Evacuate them.’ In an hour, he sent us a car, a bus, and an escort. But not all families agreed to leave. This story still hurts me. I couldn’t insist that all families go to a safe place. Most of them came from the East [of Ukraine] and simply didn’t believe the scale [of the war] would be so large. They didn’t believe they needed to evacuate. They said that it wouldn’t be for long — just for a day or two, and they had to take care of their children, change the ‘plugs,’ wash the catheters, and be near the hospital — and so they stayed. And then they just went home. We eventually lost touch with two families. We don’t even know whether they are alive or not. Only three families went to Ternopil that day.”
When it got clear that the situation is very dangerous for the children, and it is almost impossible to continue treatment in such conditions, the Foundation arranged evacuation to Italy.
“This was the first such medical evacuation in Ukraine. We organized everything literally in 24 hours,” says Natalia. “In the morning, we received a call: ‘We are leaving,’ and on the next day the children were already in Italian clinics. Our partners arranged for medical planes that flew to Poland for them [the children]. Now it has been worked out, but that first evacuation was a bit crazy for me, for I didn’t at all realize where those children were going. And here they call me and say that they [the children] have to be taken away. I contact our partners in Italy — ‘Will you be able to host them?’ They say that ‘while you are on the way, we’ll organize everything.’ And till the last moment I didn’t understand where we were taking them, whether everything would be prepared there, for these weren’t healthy children, whom you can simply locate somewhere in a hotel. These were the children who did need constant medical care. It was cold, and queues at the border were incredible. The police understood everything and simply pushed people to let these children pass, because it was risky indeed — whether they would survive this trip or not. Fortunately, everyone survived, everyone is being treated, some have even come back”.
Back then, Zaporuka realized that it was capable of this as well — organizing an extremely complicated evacuation of sick children in wartime conditions. Hence, when information about this opportunity began to spread among doctors, everyone started to call Natalia with similar requests. As a result, Zaporuka has already taken more than a hundred children to Italy for treatment.
Now the demand is not so huge, as the Cancer Institute and Okhmatdyt are working in Kyiv, as well the Western Ukrainian Specialized Children’s Medical Centre in Lviv, where children can go in case the capital is threated. On February 15, the International Childhood Cancer Day, the first transplant department in Western Ukraine was opened there. This is a project that the Foundation has been working on for two years, as previously transplantation was only done in Kyiv, and there were long queues for it. Now, even during the war, Ukrainian doctors have already performed two transplants in the newly created department.
A Beautiful House in Kyiv
“When it’s all over, I don’t want to organize humanitarian aid anymore. I want to develop the project of my life — Dacha, I want professional psychologists and rehabilitators to work there. I want to work with the society so that volunteers could come here, get to know the children, and tell them that cancer is not death. That’s a serious disease, but they should go through that period. So that other organizations also realized that helping cancer patients is not just about medicines. That’s also about psychology. That every hospital should have such houses, so that children didn’t have to live in gloomy, scary wards.”
Natalia’s favorite pre-war story is about a girl Sofia, who once lived at Dacha. She was treated when she was only three years old. Decades later, journalists will approach her and ask what she recollects about her illness and Sofia will say that she only remembers living in a beautiful house in Kyiv.
“You see? She won’t remember her pain, procedures, and illness — she’ll remember a nice place! That’s crucial,” rejoices Natalia.
The new Dacha, which will be able to accommodate 15 families at once, will also become such a place, including all the things that were missing in the rented one — children’s and teenage zones, play areas and themed rooms, and even a soundproof room, which was requested by the teenagers themselves to have a place where they can listen to music loudly, sing, or even cry. Everyone will have their own space there.
However, despite all the novelty of the complex, it has one major drawback, which was revealed by the new military reality. There is no shelter or basement there, because underground waters are too close, and the practice of building shelter rooms, like the Israeli ones, has not yet developed in Ukraine. So now, architects are working hard to solve the problem.
“If we open and the war will be still ongoing, I’m not sure that we’ll settle children with cancer here. I think that we’ll first house people who have lost their homes,” Natalia says. “And then we’ll implement what we’ve been working on for so many years — a new, bright Dacha, where every child will be able to defeat cancer.”
Please support the Dacha Center here. You can also read this text in Ukrainian.