The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
Irina Konovalova arrived in Poland on April 16 with dark circles under her eyes.
Russian soldiers — “occupiers” or “invaders,” she calls them — took her and her mother from their home in the smoldering city of Mariupol in southeast Ukraine to a nearby village. For 19 days they traveled from town to town, stopping in Lviv, then eventually the border village of Medyka, Poland.
Besides her cat Slotki, the 23-year-old had almost nothing but her winter parka and a pink hat that reads “It’s a good day.”
“That and her boots are really the only thing she owns,” said American Fork resident Bob McGee as he walked through a sprawling mall near downtown Krakow. “We’re going to try and change that.”
A former chief financial officer at a bank, McGee is one of many Latter-day Saints in Krakow, working 15-hour days and dipping into his personal bank account to help Ukrainian refugees navigate life in a foreign country.
They’re a small slice of the interfaith pie now baked into Poland, after denominations from around the world flocked to Eastern Europe to help the millions of refugees now living there.
It’s apparent in the busting border village of Medyka, where faith groups at one point helped admit 11,000 refugees a day. Or the historic churches of Poland that transformed into refugee centers with the help of a small, nondenominational church from England. Even the sprawling city of Krakow, which is now ground zero for independent Latter-day Saint volunteers.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
