A 6-year-old Ukrainian girl lost an eye. How a U.S. aid group stepped in to help
Six-year-old Alisa Kulzhynska isn't the only child disfigured during the 15-month war that Russia is waging against Ukraine. But her journey to recovery is unique.
In Alisa's case, it was a mortar attack that demolished her family apartment, and a piece of shrapnel that took out her eye.
But while other child victims of the 15-month Russia-Ukraine war have found help from international doctors traveling to the battlefield, Kulzhynska's route was different. She found healing in an unusual way: an American benefactor brought her to the United States, and gave her a new eye.
A Florida-based aid group, Romulus T. Weatherman Foundation, that is managing two major private medical and humanitarian projects on the ground in Ukraine, learned about Alisa’s wounds from volunteers working at the Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv. The foundation has been rescuing children and mothers from battle fields from early days of the war.
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‘Nothing short of a Holocaust’
”The children of Ukraine are being subjected to nothing short of a Holocaust," said Alisa's benefactor Andrew Duncan. .”
Just minutes before the explosion, Alisa asked her father to bring her a glass of water. “I started toward the kitchen but the next moment the entire apartment filled up with smoke and I could hear my daughter crying,” the father remembered. “I took her in my hands, her face was covered in blood; I began to bang on the wall to keep her conscious.”
The ambulance arrived in a few minutes. Both Alisa and her mother were hospitalized, the mother was taken to a hospital in Mykolaiv, farther away from the front, and Alisa was later moved to the largest children’s hospital in Ukraine, Okhmatdyt in Kyiv, where doctors provided the best possible treatment for Alisa and dozens of Ukrainian children wounded in war. Air alerts and shelling continued in Kyiv. Alisa’s parents were looking for a safer and more specialized hospital, and Alisa’s journey to the U.S. began.
The Romulus T. Weatherman Foundation, established by Elizabeth H. Weatherman and Andrew Duncan, provided aid for Alisa and set in motion her travel for rehabilitation at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Duncan, who has been evacuating mothers and children from war zones for months, hopped on the plane to Warsaw to meet Alisa.
Duncan and his helpers on the humanitarian operation, who he called Team Alisa, organized an ambulance and a doctor to accompany the family. “Having been under mortar fire myself five miles out of Kherson, I looked at Alisa and thought, since I have the best Florida health care, why shouldn’t Alisa?” Duncan said. “To me the fight for Ukraine is not a battle of autocracy versus democracy, it is a battle of humanity versus evil. Alisa is one of humanity’s better angels, so as an American to whom much is given, I feel like much is expected from me.”
Kostiantyn, who during the past weeks has been working as a nurse for both of his loved ones, accompanied his family. The treatment will benefit Alisa, but Kostiantyn, too: The father has been wracked by guilt for not protecting his family, despite the arbitrary nature of artillery strikes that land randomly throughout Kherson and are no-one's fault on the receiving end. Still, the possibility to have superior care for his daughter helps, he said.
“We have hard times ahead in a foreign country," Kostiantyn said. "But we know that the worst nightmare is over.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Ukraine, Russia war and a young girl who lost an eye
