OUR STORY

My name is David Hahn, and I adopted my two boys, Willem and Aidan, from Kharkiv, Ukraine in February, 2001. Many of you know and love them already and the story of Valentina, our brave Ukrainian translator/adoption facilitator, whose great love and courage saved Aidan's life in the end. The details of our harrowing adventure in Kharkiv are numerous and perhaps unimportant to our purposes now. But it involved the Mafia, a couple of Ukrainian jails and many heart stopping moments! It is a pretty great story.

Tragically, the boys' orphanage was located between Kharkiv and the Russian border, directly where the fiercest fighting had been going on since the beginning of the invasion. We understand that the entire area, along with the orphanage, was completely destroyed with many deaths including children and heard horrifying stories of caretakers who were unable to reach some orphanages, forcing the children to fend for themselves in the middle of war, with some leaving only to wander the battlefields alone. It is difficult to comprehend how we got here from the happiness we knew just a few weeks ago.

When we left Valentina at Kyiv Airport over 21 years ago, with my new tired and hungry handful, email was just getting started, and through some unfortunate events, we lost the only phone number I had for her parents' home somewhere in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the boys always remembered her vividly and with much love, never knowing a warm touch or tender gaze before. I had always wished at every birthday and graduation, and so many moments in between, that she could see the boys happy and thriving. I just wanted her to know that the kids are alright. We searched for her for twenty-one years, never a few months going by without some attempt to locate Valentina Shevchuk, the Ukrainian equivalent of Mary Smith. In early February, I reached out to the Ukrainian Embassy one more time asking for any help to find her. They were a little busy with all the Russian tanks on the border but suggested I ask for help in a Ukrainian adoption group on Facebook which is something I had not thought of. After a few miraculous twists and turns, we found her after over two decades of searching. She was not, as I had often feared, victim of a number of scary scenarios that I could imagine. But rather, she was happily married in the city of Zhytomyr with two beautiful boys of her own, Artur and Bohdan.

It felt like a wound finally closing, and words can't express the joy we all felt that day. We excitedly began to plan our far overdue family reunion, whether in Ukraine or in California, when the first bombs began to fall just an hour away in Kyiv. It has been a surreal and terrifying experience to share, and the tears we have shed since that moment could fill an ocean. But one great happiness amidst this madness is that we still used this time to get to know Artur and Bohdan, if only by phone, and not in person as originally planned. We never could have imagined a couple of months ago that our long-awaited happy reunion would eventually take place hiding in a cellar from Russian bombs. Since then, each day brings fresh new horrors, and the calendar was marked by our deepening shock and sadness.

As the war shifts to the East, life is starting to move again above ground in Central Ukraine, but still far from normal. The school where Valentina taught English was bombed and destroyed. Bohdan, at just 13, shares the trauma all Ukrainian children know so well today. Just a few months before the invasion, Artur got married to his love and started a promising new agri-business in an economy that doesn't exist anymore. The personal and collective heartbreak is an endless river in Ukraine. But we still talk everyday of life after the war, partly to distract from Russia's atrocities, but mostly to show ourselves that we are still full of hope. It turns out that we are all devoted animal lovers. And with central Ukraine becoming safer in recent days, as we continue to pray for the East, we see an opportunity to help the animals suffering so much in this horrific war and hope you can join us on this important journey.