Our staff member, Tetiana, recently travelled hom to Ukraine to visit family and had the chance to meet up with our team there and visit families working with Mission Without Borders. This is the first installment ina series of stories from her trip.

Going home to a country at war

I have made this flight before - Toronto to Warsaw, then on into Ukraine. But this time was different. This time, the country I was flying toward was my own, suffering and fighting for her independence, a country struggling in war for 4 years.

I grew up in Ukraine before I made my life in Canada. My family still lives in Kyiv, and every vacation day I have goes toward visiting the people I love there. This time I combined visiting my family along with families in western Ukraine supported by Canadians through Mission Without Borders.

I landed in Warsaw, Poland and took two trains from there into Ukraine, my mind already rehearsing what I might see. Nothing rehearses you for the reality.

Three nights in Kyiv

I spent my first three days in Kyiv, staying with people I love. Every one of those nights, the air-raid sirens came. Starting around midnight or one in the morning, the blaring alarms lasting sometimes until four, and often beginning again not long after that.

The first night, I lay in the dark listening to a sound of  flying missiles and drones. Then came the explosions. It wasn't just distant thunder, the concussions close enough that the building I was in shook.

We went down to the bomb shelter, a routine for the people living there that has become an ordinary part of the night. And it was in that shelter, on the second night, that I met a six-year-old girl named Nastia.

She was sitting near her mother, swinging her legs, entirely unbothered by the chaos above us, or so it seemed. At some point, between explosions, she turned to me and said, very matter-of-factly, that if I prayed, the bombing would stop.

Then she taught me her prayer. A six-year-old, teaching a grown woman how to pray in a bomb shelter, as if this were the most natural lesson in the world.

I have thought about that moment more than almost anything else from this trip. I came to Ukraine to encourage families who have endured so much. Instead, in the middle of a war, a child encouraged me.

Both nights followed the same pattern - sirens, the shelter, explosions, and the waiting for morning. When daylight came I saw one apartment building, about three kilometers from where I was staying, had been hit directly. Multi-story buildings reduced to broken concrete and exposed rebar. Cars that had been parked on the street below were crushed under the falling debris, some of them barely recognizable at all. I stood at a distance and looked at what had, just days earlier, been someone's home, someone's balcony, someone's morning routine.

Buildings damaged by attacks in Kyiv

Ordinary Life, Extraordinary Circumstances

What struck me most those first days in Kyiv wasn't the destruction - it was how life continued around it. My family is still there. My friends are still there, working, raising children, going to church, meeting for coffee.

There is a particular kind of strength in choosing to keep living fully in a place where danger is a daily possibility. I saw it in the people I love. Watching them go about their days with steadiness taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way - resilience isn't the absence of fear, it's continuing to hope in spite of it.

The Drive to Rivne

From Kyiv, I drove five hours to Rivne. Partway through the journey, my navigation stopped working entirely - for two hours I was driving without any clear sense of the road ahead, relying on instinct and the occasional road sign. It felt, in a small way, like a picture of the whole trip. I didn't have a map for what I was about to experience. I simply had to keep driving.

Meeting the Team

When I arrived in Rivne, I went to the Mission Without Borders Ukraine office and met the team who carry out our work every single day. Not from a distance, but in person, in the towns and villages where the need is greatest. What stayed with me was their warmth. These are people who show up, again and again, for families in the hardest circumstances. And they do it with a gentleness that has nothing to do with obligation and everything to do with love.

Tetiana, and Iryna, a young girl whose family is part of the Family Partnership program in Ukraine.

Their support goes far beyond a checklist. Yes, it's food, hygiene supplies, school backpacks, a washing machine, tractors,  replacement windows - all practical things that matter enormously in daily life. But it's also something harder to measure: presence, encouragement, the simple assurance that someone is praying for you. In the stories that follow, I'll share more about how MWB Ukraine walks alongside each family. But even in this first visit, I understood something clearly - these families need both. They need help with the material weight of survival, and they need to know they are not carrying it alone.

They were the ones who would take me to meet the families I'd come so far to see.

What Was Ahead

I didn't know how much these families would give me in return as I prepared for the visits. I came with a notebook and a camera, ready to document their stories for you, our sponsors back in Canada. I left with something closer to a gift - a deeper understanding of what faith looks like when it is tested, and what generosity looks like when it reaches someone at exactly the right moment.

I'll introduce you to five families in Rivne and Sarny in this series. You will meet mothers holding their households together, children who still find reasons to laugh, and people who have lost so much and yet still speak of hope without hesitation. Their stories are the reason I said yes to this trip. They are the reason your support matters more than you may ever fully see.

 I'm grateful you're coming with me.