This is the last installment in the series.
Before we even arrived, Pavlo, the Mission Without Borders coordinator, spoke to me about Olesya with a warmth I could hear in his voice. He told me how strong she is, how God keeps her, how deeply she loves Him, and how she carries that love out into the world around her, especially to her children. Neither her husband nor his own parents help her, he said, or offer her much love in return. And still, he told me, she loves them. She helps them. She prays for them. He didn't say it as a sad fact. He said it like he was describing something remarkable.
I understood what he meant within minutes of meeting her.
Olesya, her son Vitaliy, twenty-one, and her daughter Khrystyna, seventeen, were waiting for us on the road before we even reached the house. Karina, eleven, and Liana, nine, appeared as we walked inside, the kind of overlapping welcome you get when a family's been listening for a car for a while. Sergiy, twenty three, the eldest, was at work and couldn't be there. We'd hear plenty about him anyway.
A Faith That Holds The Family Together
The family has five children, and if there's one thing that defines this household, it's this: faith runs through it almost entirely through Olesya. It's her belief that anchors everything else. She was the one who first brought her children to church, who opened up God's love to them in a way they could understand and hold onto themselves. She now serves as a preacher there herself, not a small thing in a village where so much of daily life is shaped by hardship. Her children have grown up watching their mother stand and speak about the God she trusts, and I think that's shaped them as much as anything else in their lives.
The boys work hard and help their mother enormously: Sergiy as an electrician, Vitaliy working the farm. Khrystyna studies accounting at college and, in whatever time is left over, draws. Karina, eleven, has been to Mission Without Borders' summer camp four times now, enough times that she calls herself a veteran of it, and clearly means it as a point of pride. Liana, at nine, is still finding her footing among five siblings with very different lives.
The family lives in a two room house, heated by gas, with the toilet outside. They keep a vegetable garden, pigs, geese, and chickens, and Olesya works temporary jobs on top of managing all of it. Her husband Ivan's parents live in a smaller house on the same piece of land, nearby, but offer the family little help and even less understanding for what Olesya and the children face day to day.
What they face is this: Ivan struggles with alcohol addiction, and it's cost him his health, problems with his heart, his liver, his kidneys, and it's cost the family his steady presence too. There was a period, not long before our visit, when he was sober and working, using Mission Without Borders' donated motorized cultivator to farm the family's land and take on paid work cultivating fields for neighbors as well. It was real progress, the kind that let the family imagine a different future. But he'd relapsed again by the time I arrived, and wasn't working, and wasn't there when we visited.
Everyone in the family attends church in their village. Everyone except Ivan.
What Mission Without Borders Brings
Mission Without Borders has given this family a motorized cultivator, a plow, and a trailer, equipment meant to help them become more self sufficient, farming not just for themselves but for income. They've also received a refrigerator, new windows, and ongoing support with food, clothing, sanitary items, and school supplies.
Sergiy and Vitaliy, in their father's absence, have become the ones who help hold the family up financially. Between Ivan's good stretches and his relapses, the family has slowly been building a small outbuilding on their land, something Ivan and Olesya started together, long ago, meant to become a new home for the family. Progress has always been slow, tied to whether Ivan is working or not. Olesya told me she hopes now that her older sons will be the ones to finish it, so the family finally has that space to live in.
Pavlo and the rest of the Mission Without Borders Ukraine staff have given this family something beyond the physical support: a steady presence Olesya spoke of with real gratitude, emotional support that matters as much as anything material.
A Mother's Love, Held Up by Something Larger Than Herself
When Olesya talked about her children, her eyes lit up in a way I can only describe as love made visible. I saw that same light reflected back in her children's eyes when they looked at her, and it wasn't the kind of warmth people perform for a visiting guest. It was simply how this family looks at each other.
Friends have told Olesya, more than once, that she should leave her husband, that on her own with the children, she could have an easier life. She won't.
"If God gives me this challenge, I will do it," she told me, not with resignation, but with a quiet resolve, the kind that comes from a woman who's decided this is a burden she can carry because she isn't carrying it alone.
When she spoke about God, her eyes were full of love. I could feel it, sitting across from her. Listening to her, I understood that her faith isn't a comfort she reaches for after the hard days. It's the ground she stands on before the hard days even arrive. As far as I could tell, it's the thing that has kept her strong enough to keep loving a husband who struggles to love her back, and to keep her children safe and whole in spite of everything stacked against them.
Olesya prayed for all of it, out loud, while we sat together: for her husband, for her children, for her whole family, and for the Canadian sponsors she's never met but speaks of like people she already loves. Her living conditions fall well below what most Ukrainian families would consider ordinary. Her life is hard in ways that don't resolve easily. And still, her heart is so full of love that she has more than enough to share: with her children, with strangers who'd just walked into her home, with people across an ocean she prays for by name.
Khrystyna, when I asked to see her drawings, told me she'd rather draw something new, right there, for the Canadian sponsors. She did, a beautiful piece I brought home with me. Karina, not to be outdone, brought me one of her own paintings a few minutes later. Vitaliy, for his part, loves working with the land and his hands, a skill both rare among his generation and genuinely essential for life in a Ukrainian village. All the girls are learning English, and they told me, a little shyly, that they hope one day to thank their Canadian sponsors in English themselves.
What I Carried Away
Before we left, we prayed together: six voices, each praying in their own words, no one reading from a script. It became, somehow, one prayer, rising out of six different hearts at once. It was the most powerful prayer I've ever been part of.
I came into that house prepared to write about hardship: addiction, absence, a house that's been half built for years. I left thinking instead about the quiet strength of a mother whose faith has become the shelter her family lives inside of. Olesya has less, by almost every material measure, than most families I know. But her trust in God has given her, and through her, given her children, something sturdier than circumstance: a sense that they're held, that they're not forgotten, and that love, even when it isn't returned, is never wasted.
Please keep praying for this family: for the outbuilding to finally be finished, for Sergiy and Vitaliy as they carry more than young men should have to, and for Ivan, that he'd find his way back to the sobriety and the family still waiting for him. And thank you, from Olesya and her children, for the support that's already made so much possible. It means more than any of us watching from Canada may ever fully understand.
