My best friend lost everything in Kharkiv

Hi, my name is Katya Levchenko, I was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. I was fortunate enough to meet my husband and move to the Netherlands. My best friend Oksana had a happy life in Ukraine, enjoying spending time with the family and counting all the blessings. Until the last minute, nobody believed in this day and age some country can decide to invade and occupy another European country, when the war had started on the 23rd of February. Oksana, together with her husband, 8-year old daughter and her mother spent 8 days in the bunker, while being trapped in the city of Kharkiv, attacked heavily from the sky and the land. On the 9th day Oksana managed to convince her husband to leave the bunker and try to reach Western Ukraine, which they eventually did. Being highly patriotic, the family had no intention to leave Ukraine, until Russia started to bombard the Western Ukraine as well. With God’s help Oksana, her mother, her daughter and their 2,5-month old first family pet (which they got just before the war started), managed to cross Ukrainian-Romanian border on the bus. They lost everything - home, income, friends and the hope for a bright future. We created a plan to get them to the Netherlands but due to the COVID restrictions, they could only travel by car, bus or train. A few calls later, some wonderful people like Narcisa, a work colleague of my husband, created the opportunity to get Oksana and her family into Romania, and then put them on a bus to meet my husband and I halfway in Vienna. We are on the way to pick them up and bring to the Netherlands, where hopefully, with the help of the people all over the World, they can start a new life from scratch. I would like to raise this money to provide at least a little bit of financial stability for them. As they left the Ukraine with very little, they will need so much to just get themselves going again. It saddens me that despite having a lot of financial support from different fund raising initiatives, single victims of the Ukrainian war don’t actually receive it and as a Ukrainian born, I feel it is my responsibility to make a greater impact for a single family rather than donate money in the pool without a way to trace it further.

God bless Ukraine