The doctors have helped a little girl with heart disease from the Volnovaha region to overcome a threshold of doom thanks to the help of kind people from afar.

Lilya Goncharuk was born in a family where there were other sickly children besides herself,   she is the third child. The doctors said that she needed an operation quickly. The diagnosis was a bad heart problem. This heart problem kept the girl behind in development from the first minutes of her life and did not promise her longevity. She would not have the opportunity to grow at the same level with other children her age.

Because the operation was so expensive for her parents they attempted to find someone who would help to solve their problem, but for a long time they were not crowned with success. At the regional public health services administration they were treated with understanding and sympathy but it was impossible to back up these feelings with money for the expenses of their daughter. They had nothing in their budget for that purpose. The father applied to a charitable fund and was told that they would help him to draw up a paper with which they could seek a sponsor on their own. It is impossible to explain how unreal this task seemed for a man from a very small village.

The problem came to the attention of some people who have been trying to help sick children in Ukraine and Russia.  The Rogers family is from Canada. Mr. Rogers is President of the Ukrainian Bible Institute in Donetsk (a branch of the Sunset International Bible Institute in Lubbock, Texas). He and his wife have been living in Donetsk for two years. They are members of the Church of Christ. The Rogers and the churches of Christ have been helping children at the Donetsk Children’s Hospital boarding school for children who have cerebral palsy, down syndrome and the Makeevka center for HIV-infected children. They decided to meddle “in a good sense” with Little Lilya`s fate.

A decision could be made by the Rogers, who also represent a charitable fund called Reach for the Children International, and the amount of the expenses was specified and agreed on and for the first time in two years there seemed to be hope for the Goncharuk family. Regional Medical Association in Donetsk under the leadership of Professor G.V.Bondar with the participation of the Head`s assistant of the regional department/administration of public health services of the regional state administration L.F. Lipchansky volunteered to organize a meeting of the parents with Jay Don and Mary Lee Rogers and to coordinate all the organizing issues.

In the Institute named after Amosov in Kiev, where the parents took the little girl, they implanted her with a pacemaker (just for information: it costs several thousand greivna). She was under the doctors` supervision for two weeks. She came back just the other day with new prospects on life. She does not understand for the present what these strangers have done for her. And as to the father he did not keep back his feelings and he sincerely admitted that he was willing to kiss their hands. One could have put a happy period at the end of this story if something had not been done for Lilya.  Yet other children with inborn heart diseases also need the same help. Do you know how many of them we have in the Donbass region? . . . 450. Every year about 150 children need to have an operation done with the purpose of correcting this problem. We do not have to search long to discover cases of these diseases.

The Institute of  Urgent  and Rehabilitation Surgery of the AMS in Donetsk as well as the Institute of Heart and Vascular Surgery in Kiev are financed from the state budget. As they say comments are unnecessary. They are extremely poorly provided with oxygen generators, valves and pacemakers which are necessary to do these surgeries.

People who have money to pay for all medical services and to get all the necessary things for the surgery do not need to worry. The needy, like Lilya Goncharuk, in the market economy fall out of the list of those who can be helped. They have nothing else to do but to count on somebody else who will give them a helping hand. But why do kind foreigners and not we ourselves show concern for the children’s health? Not by words of mouth but in action through our giving?

We joke at the present time when a new “Mercedes” is chosen to match the color of our socks.  We admire contestants with a rabbit’s tails on their bottoms receiving a beauty title and we pave their way to the podium with money. And how much advertising and “fireworks” the rich  “eat up”… that does not count other people’s money they consume as well. But as I compare those expenditures with the one that saved the girl`s life I can not keep back bitterness – just a thousand and a half dollars and a few thousand grivnyas.

The doomed girl received the financial support from over the ocean and not from her fellow-countrymen. Soon that generosity will also be received by a fourteen-year-old boy who has problems with his heart also. Now the Rogers are concerned about him. And their distant fellow-countrymen are collecting the necessary amount of money for him as well. And it makes no difference to me that the church which they represent is called differently than ours. Yet its teaching is based on the familiar teaching of Christ which calls us to love our neighbor and help him.

It is good that these village people have received help. The times have passed when missionaries from afar were not allowed to help with public health services lest its main “military” secret – complete impoverishment - was “declassified”. Now we accept charitable goods of all kinds such as medical equipment and medicines. And we even are ready to present multi-volume lists of what else we would like to get and what is second hand. But for some reason we present them not to our local new rich Ukrainians for whom a thousand “grivnas” is mere change.  Nor to the state that so far has not put one of the most important spheres of activity – public health – on the proper well-provided level.

… As they were trying to get Lilya talking at the platform after her return she showed them her tongue in reply and laughed. That unrealized grimace is a result of our social system. Are we too busy with other things to take a closer look ourselves?  We need to take care of our “heart trouble”. How many like Lilya are lost amid a lot of noise by a pathetic lack of concrete participation in the lives of others.

Lilya Goncharuk, her mother and Mary Lee Rogers who has become a good fairy for her.

Some information to think over:

 The children of the region with inborn defects of heart and vessels who are in need in 2003:

Oxygen generators – 150,
Artificial heart valves – 50,
Two-camera pacemakers – 50.