My dear friend Maryna, along with her 9-year old son Oleg and her elderly parents, are desperately trying to escape the ongoing hell of war in Ukraine. If you read the news, you are aware of the bombings and other terror Ukrainians live with on a daily basis, so I won't belabor you with details of the ongoing atrocities.

This war has forced Maryna and her family to abandon their home, give up most of their possessions and basically take to the road. But without money and other basic necessities, they are finding it impossible to reach safety in western Ukraine and eventually in Poland as refugees.

Maryna and her family live in a constant state of fear and terror, and they urgently need our support. The cost of food and any type of lodging has reached stratospheric levels, making them unaffordable to many middle-class citizens. They just need enough to reach safety and find a place to live outside of the war zone to begin their new lives.

I am including below one of her recent messages. Please take a minute to read it and consider making a donation – however small – to help save my friend, her son and her parents from this horrible war.

“We are shocked that we had to leave the house, especially the parents did not want to leave, they wanted to stay in the village, but I persuaded them that I needed them to be safe. It's scary what will happen today and tomorrow.

“Our spirit here worse because we left the house and went into the unknown, this is how many Ukrainians live now, they just run somewhere away from the bombing … it’s hard to live when you don’t know what will happen tomorrow, when there are no plans. You don’t know what to hope for because it seems the end will not be soon, and the situation will only get worse.”